The Bonesetter's Daughter

ONE

For the past eight years, always starting on August twelfth, Ruth Young lost her voice.

The first time it happened was when she moved into Art's flat in San Francisco. For several days, Ruth could only hiss like an untended teakettle. She figured it was a virus, or perhaps allergies to a particular mold in the building.

When she lost her voice again, it was on their first anniversary of living together, and Art joked that her laryngitis must be psychosomatic. Ruth wondered whether it was. When she was a child, she lost her voice after breaking her arm. Why was that? On their second anniversary, she and Art were stargazing in the Grand Tetons. According to a park pamphlet, "During the peak of the Perseids, around August 12th, hundreds of 'shooting' or 'falling' stars streak the sky every hour. They are actually fragments of meteors penetrating the earth's atmosphere, burning up in their descent." Against the velvet blackness, Ruth silently admired the light show with Art. She did not actually believe that her laryngitis was star-crossed, or that the meteor shower had anything to do with her inability to speak. Her mother, though, had often told Ruth throughout her childhood that shooting stars were really "melting ghost bodies" and it was bad luck to see them. If you did, that meant a ghost was trying to talk to you. To her mother, just about anything was a sign of ghosts: broken bowls, barking dogs, phone calls with only silence or heavy breathing at the other end.

The following August, rather than just wait for muteness to strike, Ruth explained to her clients and friends that she was taking a planned weeklong retreat into verbal silence. "It's a yearly ritual," she said, "to sharpen my consciousness about words and their necessity." One of her book clients, a New Age psychotherapist, saw voluntary silence as a "wonderful process." and decided he would engage in the same so they could include their findings in a chapter on either dysfunctional family dynamics or stillness as therapy.

From then on, Ruth's malady was elevated to an annual sanctioned event. She stopped talking two days before her voice faded of its own accord. She politely declined Art's offer that they both try speaking in sign language. She made her voiceless state a decision, a matter of will, and not a disease or a mystery. In fact, she came to enjoy her respite from talk; for a whole week she did not need to console clients, remind Art about social schedules, warn his daughters to be careful, or feel guilty for not calling her mother.

This was the ninth year. Ruth, Art, and the girls had driven the two hundred miles to Lake Tahoe for the Days of No Talk, as they called them. Ruth had envisioned the four of them holding hands and walking down to the Truckee River to watch the nightly meteor showers in quiet awe. But the mosquitoes were working overtime, and Dory whimpered that she saw a bat, to which Fia teased, "Who cares about rabies when the forest is full of ax murderers?" After they fled back to the cabin, the girls said they were bored. "There's no cable television?" they complained. So Art drove them to Tahoe City and rented videos, mainly horror flicks. He and the girls slept through most of them, and though Ruth hated the movies, she could not stop watching. She dreamed of deranged babysitters and oozing aliens.

On Sunday, when they returned home to San Francisco, cranky and sweaty, they discovered they had no hot water. The tank had leaked, and the heating element apparently had fried to death. They were forced to make do with kettle-warmed baths; Art didn't want to be gouged by emergency plumbing rates. Without a voice, Ruth couldn't argue, and she was glad. To argue would mean she was offering to foot the bill, something she had done so often over their years of living together that it had become expected of her. But because she did not offer, she felt petty, then irked that Ark said nothing further about the matter. At bedtime he nuzzled her neck and bumped gently into her backside. When she tensed, he said, "Suit yourself," and rolled over, and this left her feeling rebuffed. She wanted to explain what was wrong-but she realized she did not know. There was nothing specific beyond her bad mood. Soon Art's sonorous breathing rumbled out of sync with her frustration, and she lay wide-eyed in the dark.

It was now nearly midnight, and in another few hours, Ruth would be able to talk. She stood in the Cubbyhole, a former pantry that served as her home office. She stepped onto a footstool and pushed open a tiny window. There it was, a sliver of a million-dollar view: the red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge that bifurcated the waters, marking bay from ocean. The air was moist and antiseptically cold against her face. She scanned the sky, but it was too light and misty to see any "ghost bodies" burning up. Foghorns started to blare. And after another minute, Ruth saw the billows, like an ethereal down comforter covering the ocean and edging toward the bridge. Her mother used to tell her that the fog was really the steam from fighting dragons, one water, the other fire. "Water and fire, come together make steam," LuLing would say in the strangely British-accented English she had acquired in Hong Kong. "You know this. Just like teapot. You touch, burn you finger off."

The fog was sweeping over the ramparts of the bridge, devouring the headlamps of cars. Nine out of ten drivers were drunk at this hour-Ruth had read that somewhere. Or maybe she had written that for a client. She stepped down, but left the window open.

The foghorns continued to wail. They sounded like tubas in a Shostakovich opera, comedically tragic. But was tragedy ever funny? Or was it only the audience who laughed knowingly as the victims walked into trapdoors and trick mirrors?

Still wide awake, Ruth turned to her desk. Just then she felt a tug of worry, something she was not supposed to forget. Did it have to do with money, a client, or a promise she had made to the girls? She set to straightening her desk, aligning her research books, sorting faxes and drafts, color-coding them according to client and book. Tomorrow she had to return to routine and deadlines, and a clean desk gave her the sense of a fresh start, an uncluttered mind. Everything had its place. If an item was of questionable priority or value, she dumped it in the bottom right-hand drawer of her desk. But now the drawer was full with unanswered letters, abandoned drafts, sheets of jotted-down ideas that might be usable in the future. She pulled out a clipped stack of paper from the bottom of the drawer, guessing she could toss out whatever had lain there the longest by neglect.

They were pages written in Chinese, her mother's writing. LuLing had given them to her five or six years before. "Just some old things about my family," she had said, with the kind of awkward nonchalance that meant the pages were important. "My story, begin little-girl time. I write for myself, but maybe you read, then you see how I grow up, come to this country." Ruth had heard bits of her mother's life over the years, but she was touched by her shyness in asking Ruth to read what she had obviously labored over. The pages contained precise vertical rows, without cross-outs, leaving Ruth to surmise that her mother had copied over her earlier attempts.

Ruth had tried to decipher the pages. Her mother had once drilled Chinese calligraphy into her reluctant brain, and she still recognized some of the characters: "thing," "I," "truth." But unraveling the rest required her to match LuLing's squiggly radicals to uniform ones in a Chinese-English dictionary. "These are the things I know are true," the first sentence read. That had taken Ruth an hour to translate. She set a goal to decipher a sentence a day. And in keeping with her plan, she translated another sentence the next evening: "My name is LuLing Liu Young." That was easy, a mere five minutes. Then came the names of LuLing's husbands, one of whom was Ruth's father. Husbands? Ruth was startled to read that there had been another. And what did her mother mean by "our secrets gone with them"? Ruth wanted to know right away, but she could not ask her mother. She knew from experience what happened whenever she asked her mother to render Chinese characters into English. First LuLing scolded her for not studying Chinese hard enough when she was little. And then, to untangle each character, her mother took side routes to her past, going into excruciating detail over the infinite meanings of Chinese words: "Secret not just mean cannot say. Can be hurt-you kinda secret, or curse-you kind, maybe do you damage forever, never can change after that…" And then came rambling about who told the secret, without saying what the secret itself was, followed by more rambling about how the person had died horribly, why this had happened, how it could have been avoided, if only such-and-such had not occurred a thousand years before. If Ruth showed impatience in listening to any of this, LuLing became outraged, before sputtering an oath that none of this mattered because soon she too would die anyway, by accident, because of bad-luck wishes, or on purpose. And then the silent treatment began, a punishment that lasted for days or weeks, until Ruth broke down first and said she was sorry.

So Ruth did not ask her mother. She decided instead to set aside several days when she could concentrate on the translation. She told her mother this, and LuLing warned, "Don't wait too long." After that, whenever her mother asked whether she had finished her story, Ruth an swered, "I was just about to, but something came up with a client." Other crises also intervened, having to do with Art, the girls, or the house, as did vacation.

"Too busy for mother," LuLing complained. "Never too busy go see movie, go away, go see friend."

The past year, her mother had stopped asking, and Ruth wondered, Did she give up? Couldn't be. She must have forgotten. By then the pages had settled to the bottom of the desk drawer.

Now that they had resurfaced, Ruth felt pangs of guilt. Perhaps she should hire someone fluent in Chinese. Art might know of someone-a linguistics student, a retired professor old enough to be versed in the traditional characters and not just the simplified ones. As soon as she had time, she would ask. She placed the pages at the top of the heap, then closed the drawer, feeling less guilty already.

When she woke in the morning, Art was up, doing his yoga stretches in the next room. "Hello," she said to herself. "Is anyone there?" Her voice was back, though squeaky from disuse.

As she brushed her teeth in the bathroom, she could hear Dory screeching: "I want to watch that. Put it back! It's my TV too." Fia hooted: "That show's for babies, and that's what you are, wnnh-wnnh-wnnh."

Since Art's divorce, the girls had been dividing their time between their mom and stepdad's home in Sausalito and Art's Edwardian flat on Vallejo Street. Every other week, the four of them-Art, Ruth, Sofia, and Dory-found themselves crammed into five miniature rooms, one of them barely big enough to squeeze in a bunkbed. There was only one bathroom, which Ruth hated for its antiquated inconvenience. The claw-footed iron tub was as soothing as a sarcophagus, and the pedestal sink with its separate spigots dispensed water that was either scalding hot or icy cold. As Ruth reached for the dental floss, she knocked over other items on the windowsill: potions for wrinkles, remedies for pimples, nose-hair clippers, and a plastic mug jammed with nine toothbrushes whose ownership and vintage were always in question. While she was picking up the mess, desperate pounding rattled the door.

"You'll have to wait," she called in a husky voice. The pounding continued. She looked at the bathroom schedule for August, which was posted on both sides of the door. There it said, clear as could be, whose turn it was at each quarter-hour. She had assigned herself to be last, and because everyone else ran late, she suffered the cumulative consequences. Below the schedule, the girls had added rules and amendments, and a list of violations and fines for infractions concerning the use of the sink, toilet, and shower, as well as a proclamation on what constituted the right to privacy versus a TRUE EMERGENCY (underlined three times).

The pounding came again. "Ru-uuth! I said it's the phone!" Dory opened the door a crack and shoved in a cordless handset. Who was calling at seven-twenty in the morning? Her mother, no doubt. LuLing seemed to have a crisis whenever Ruth had not called in several days.

"Ruthie, is your voice back? Can you talk?" It was Wendy, her best friend. They spoke nearly every day. She heard Wendy blow her nose. Was she actually crying?

"What happened?" Ruth whispered. Don't tell me, don't tell me, she mouthed in rhythm to her racing heart. Wendy was about to tell her she had cancer, Ruth was sure of it. Last night's uneasy feeling started to trickle through her veins.

"I'm still in shock," Wendy went on. "I'm about to… Hold on. I just got another call."

It must not be cancer, Ruth thought. Maybe she was mugged, or thieves had broken into the house, and now the police were calling to take a report. Whatever it was, it must have been serious, otherwise Wendy would not be crying. What should she say to her? Ruth crooked the phone in her neck and dragged her fingers through her close-cropped hair. She noticed that some of the mirror's silver had flaked off. Or were those white roots in her hair? She would soon turn forty-six. When had the baby fat in her face started to recede? To think she used to resent having the face and skin of a perpetual teenager. Now she had creases pulling down the corners of her mouth. They made her look displeased, like her mother. Ruth brightened her mouth with lipstick. Of course, she wasn't like her mother in other respects, thank God. Her mother was permanently unhappy with everything and everybody. LuLing had immersed her in a climate of unsolvable despair throughout Ruth's childhood. That was why Ruth hated it whenever she and Art argued. She tried hard not to get angry. But sometimes she reached a breaking point and erupted, only to wonder later how she had lost control.

Wendy came back on the line. "You still there? Sorry. We're casting victims for that earthquake movie, and a million people are calling all at once." Wendy ran her own agency that hunted extras as San Francisco local color-cops with handlebar mustaches, six-foot-six drag queens, socialites who were unknowing caricatures of themselves. "On top of everything, I feel like shit," Wendy said, and stopped to sneeze and blow her nose. So she wasn't crying, Ruth realized, before the phone clicked twice. "Damn," Wendy said. "Hang on. Let me get rid of this call."

Ruth disliked being put on hold. What was so dire that Wendy had to tell her first thing in the morning? Had Wendy's husband had an affair? Joe? Not good old Joe. What, then?

Art ducked his head through the doorway and tapped his watch. Seven twenty-five, he mouthed. Ruth was about to tell him it was Wendy with an emergency, but he was already striding down the narrow hallway. "Dory! Fia! Let's hustle! Ruth is taking you to the ice rink in five minutes. Get a move on." The girls squealed, and Ruth felt like a horse at the starting gate.

"I'll be there in a sec!" she called out. "And girls, if you didn't eat breakfast, I want you to drink milk, a full glass, so you won't fall over dead from hypoglycemic shock."

"Don't say 'dead.'" Dory griped. "I hate it when you say that."

"My God. What's going on there?" Wendy was back on the line.

"The usual start of the week," Ruth said. "Chaos is the penance for leisure."

"Yeah, who said that?"

"I did. So anyway, you were saying…?"

"Promise me first you won't tell anyone," Wendy sneezed again.

"Of course."

"Not even Art, and especially not Miss Giddy."

"Gideon? Gee, I don't know if I can promise about him."

"So last night," Wendy began, "my mother called in a state of euphoria." As Wendy went on, Ruth dashed to the bedroom to finish getting dressed. When she was not in a hurry, she enjoyed listening to her friend's ramblings. Wendy was a divining rod for strange disturbances in the earth's atmosphere. She was witness to bizarre sights: three homeless albinos living in Golden Gate Park, a BMW suddenly swallowed up by an ancient septic tank in Woodside, a loose buffalo strolling down Taraval Street. She was the maven of parties that led people to make scenes, start affairs, and commit other self-renewing scandals. Ruth believed Wendy made her life more sparkly, but today was not a good time for sparkles.

"Ruth!" Art said in a warning tone. "The girls are going to be late."

"I'm really sorry, Wendy. I have to take the girls to ice-skating school-"

Wendy interrupted. "Mommy married her personal trainer! That's what she called to tell me. He's thirty-eight, she's sixty-four. Can you believe it?"

"Oh… Wow." Ruth was stunned. She pictured Mrs. Scott with a groom in a bow tie and gym shorts, the two of them reciting vows on a treadmill. Was Wendy upset? She wanted to say the right thing. What, though? About five years before, her own mother had had a boyfriend of sorts, but he had been eighty. Ruth had hoped T.C. would marry LuLing and keep her occupied. Instead T.C. had died of a heart attack.

"Listen, Wendy, I know this is important, so can I call you back after I drop off the girls? "

Once she had hung up. Ruth reminded herself of the tasks she needed to do today. Ten things, and she tapped first her thumb. One, take the girls to skating school. Two, pick up Art's suits at the dry cleaner's. Three, buy groceries for dinner. Four, pick up the girls from the rink and drop them off at their friend's house on Jackson Street. Five and Six, phone calls to that arrogant client, Ted, then Agapi Agnos, whom she actually liked. Seven, finish the outline for a chapter of Agapi Agnos's book. Eight, call her agent, Gideon, whom Wendy disliked. And Nine-what the hell was Nine? She knew what Ten was, the last task of the day. She had to call Miriam, Art's ex-wife, to ask if she would let them have the girls the weekend of the Full Moon Festival dinner, the annual reunion of the Youngs, which she was hosting this year.

So what was Nine? She always organized her day by the number of digits on her hands. Each day was either a five or a ten. She wasn't rigid about it: add-ons were accommodated on the toes of her feet, room for ten unexpected tasks. Nine, Nine… She could make calling Wendy number One and bump everything back. But she knew that call should be a toe, an extra, an Eleven. What was Nine? Nine was usually something important, a significant number, what her mother termed the number of fullness, a number that also stood for Do not forget, or risk losing all. Did Nine have something to do with her mother? There was always something to worry about with her mother. That was not anything she had to remember in particular. It was a state of mind.

LuLing was the one who had taught her to count fingers as a memory device. With this method, LuLing never forgot a thing, especially lies, be trayals, and all the bad deeds Ruth had done since she was born. Ruth could still picture her mother counting in the Chinese style, pointing first to her baby finger and bending each finger down toward her palm, a motion that Ruth took to mean that all other possibilities and escape routes were closed. Ruth kept her own fingers open and splayed, American style. What was Nine? She put on a pair of sturdy sandals.

Art appeared at the doorway. "Sweetie? Don't forget to call the plumber about the hot-water tank."

The plumber was not going to be number Nine, Ruth told herself, absolutely not. "Sorry, honey, but could you call? I've got a pretty full day."

"I have meetings, and three appeals coming up." Art worked as a linguistics consultant, this year on cases involving deaf prisoners who had been arrested and tried without access to interpreters.

It's your house, Ruth was tempted to say. But she forced herself to sound reasonable, unassailable, like Art. "Can't you call from your office in between meetings?"

"Then I have to phone you and figure out when you'll be here for the plumber."

"I don't know exactly when I'll be home. And you know those guys. They say they're coming at one, they show up at five. Just because I work at home doesn't mean I don't have a real job. I've got a really crazy day. For one thing, I have to…" And she started to list her tasks.

Art slumped his shoulders and sighed. "Why do you have to make everything so difficult? I just thought if it were possible, if you had time- Aw, forget it." He turned away.

"Okay, okay, I'll take care of it. But if you get out of your meetings early, can you come home?"

"Sure thing." Art gave her a kiss on the forehead. "Hey, thanks. I wouldn't have asked if I weren't completely swamped." He kissed her again. "Love you."

She didn't answer, and after he left, she grabbed her coat and keys, then saw the girls standing at the end of the hallway, staring critically at her. She wiggled her big toe. Twelve, hot water.

Ruth started the car and pumped the brakes to make sure they worked. As she drove Fia and Dory to the skating rink, she was still mulling over what Nine might be. She ran through the alphabet, in case any of those letters might trigger a memory. Nothing. What had she dreamed the night before, when she finally fell asleep? A bedroom window, a dark shape in the bay. The curtains, she now recalled, had turned out to be sheer and she was naked. She had looked up and saw the neighbors in nearby apartments grinning. They had been watching her most private moments, her most private parts. Then a radio began to blare. Whonk! Whonk! Whonk! "This has been a test of the American Broadcasting System's early-warning signal for disaster preparedness." And another voice came on, her mother's: "No, no, this is not test! This real!" And the dark shape in the bay rose and became a tidal wave.

Maybe number Nine was related to the plumber after all: tidal wave, broken water heater. The puzzle was solved. But what about the sheer curtains? What did that mean? The worry billowed up again.

"You know that new girl Darien likes?" she heard Fia say to her sister. "She has the best hair. I could just kill her."

"Don't say 'kill'!" Dory intoned. "Remember what they told us in assembly last year? Use that word, go to jail."

Both girls were in the backseat. Ruth had suggested that one of them sit up front with her, so she wouldn't feel like a chauffeur. But Dory had replied, "It's easier to open just one door." Ruth had said nothing in response. She often suspected the girls were testing her, to see if they could get a rise out of her. When they were younger, they had loved her, Ruth was sure of it. She had felt that with a ticklish pleasure in her heart. They used to argue over who could hold her hand or sit next to her. They had cuddled against her when scared, as they had often pretended to be, squeaking like helpless kittens. Now they seemed to be in a contest over who could irritate her more, and she sometimes had to remind herself that teenagers had souls.

Dory was thirteen and chunky, larger than her fifteen-year-old sister. They wore their long chestnut hair alike, pulled into ponytails high on their heads so that they cascaded like fountain spray. All their friends wore their hair in an identical style, Ruth had noticed. When she was their age, she had wanted to grow her hair long the way the other girls did, but her mother made her cut it short. "Long hair look like suicide maiden," Lu-Ling had said. And Ruth knew she was referring to the nursemaid who had killed herself when her mother was a girl. Ruth had had nightmares about that, the ghost with long hair, dripping blood, crying for revenge.

Ruth pulled up to the unloading zone at the rink. The girls scrambled out of the car and swung their satchels onto their backs. "See ya!" they shouted.

Suddenly Ruth noticed what Fia was wearing-low-slung jeans and a cropped shirt that bared a good six inches of belly. She must have had her jacket zipped up when they had left home. Ruth lowered the car window and called out: "Fia, sweetie, come here a second… Am I wrong, or did your shirt shrink drastically in the last ten minutes?"

Fia turned around slowly and rolled her eyes upward.

Dory grinned. "I told you she would."

Ruth stared at Fia's navel. "Does your mother know you're wearing that?"

Fia dropped her mouth in mock shock, her reaction to most things. "Uh, she bought it for me, okay?"

"Well, I don't think your dad would approve. I want you to keep your jacket on, even when you're skating. And Dory, you tell me if she doesn't."

"I'm not telling on nobody!"

Fia turned and walked away.

"Fia? Fia! Come back here. You promise me now, or I'm going to take you home to change clothes."

Fia stopped but didn't turn around. "All right," she grumbled. As she yanked up the jacket zipper, she said to Dory, loud enough for Ruth to hear: "Dad's right. She loves to make everything sooo difficult."

The remark both humiliated and rankled her. Why had Art said that, and especially in front of the girls? He knew how much that would hurt her. A former boyfriend had once told her she made life more complicated than it was, and after they broke up, she was so horrified that his accusations might be true that she made it a point to be reasonable, to present facts, not complaints. Art knew that and had even assured her the boyfriend was a jerk. Yet he still sometimes teased that she was like a dog that circles and bites its own tail, not recognizing she was only making herself miserable.

Ruth thought of a book she had helped write a few years before, The Physics of Human Nature. The author had recast the principles of physics into basic homilies to remind people of self-defeating behavioral patterns. "The Law of Relative Gravity": Lighten up. A problem is only as heavy as you let it be. "The Doppler Effect of Communication": There is always distortion between what a speaker says and what a listener wants it to mean. "The Centrifugal Force of Arguments": The farther you move from the core of the problem, the faster the situation spins out of control.

At the time, Ruth thought the analogies and advice were simplistic. You couldn't reduce real life into one-liners. People were more complex than that. She certainly was, wasn't she? Or was she too complicated? Complex, complicated, what was the difference? Art, on the other hand, was the soul of understanding. Her friends often said as much: "You are so lucky." She had been proud when she first heard that, believing she had chosen well in love. Lately she had considered whether they might have meant he was to be admired for putting up with her. But then Wendy reminded her, "You were the one who called Art a fucking saint." Ruth wouldn't have put it that way, but she knew the sentiment must have been true. She remembered that before she ever loved Art, she had admired him-his calm, the stability of his emotions. Did she still? Had he changed, or was it she? She drove toward the dry cleaner's, mulling over these questions.

She had met Art nearly ten years before, at an evening yoga class she had attended with Wendy. The class was her first attempt in years to exercise. Ruth was naturally thin and didn't have an incentive at first to join a health club. "A thousand bucks a year," she had marveled, "to jump on a machine that makes you run like a hamster in a wheel?" Her preferred form of exercise, she told Wendy, was stress. "Clench muscles, hold for twelve hours, release for a count of five, then clench again." Wendy, on the other hand, had put on thirty-five pounds since her days as a high school gymnast and was eager to get back into shape. "Let's at least take the free fitness test," she said. "No obligation to join."

Ruth secretly gloated when she scored better than Wendy in sit-ups. Wendy cheered aloud at besting Ruth in push-ups. Ruth's body-fat ratio was a healthy twenty-four percent. Wendy's was thirty-seven. "It's the enduring genetics of my Chinese peasant stock," Ruth kindly offered. But then Ruth scored in the "very poor" range for flexibility. "Wow," Wendy remarked. "According to this chart, that's about one point above rigor mortis."

"Look here, they have yoga," Wendy later said as they perused the schedule of classes at the club. "I hear yoga can change your life. Plus they have night classes." She nudged Ruth. "It might help you get over Paul."

In the locker room that first night, they overheard two women talking. "The guy next to me asked if I'd like to go with him to that midnight class, Togaless Yoga. You know, he says, the nude one."

"Nude? What a scumbag!… Was he at least good-looking?"

"Not bad. But can you imagine facing the naked butts of twenty people doing Downward-Facing Dog?" The two women walked out of the locker room. Ruth turned to Wendy. "Who the hell would do nude yoga?"

"Me," Wendy said. "And don't look at me like that, Miss Shock-and-Dismay. At least it wouldn't be boring."

"Nude, with total strangers?"

"No, with my CPA, my dentist, my boss. Who do you think?"

In the crowded workout room, thirty disciples, most of them women, were staking out their turf, then adjusting mats as stragglers came in. When a man rolled out his mat next to Ruth's, she avoided looking at him, in case he was the scumbag. She glanced around. Most of the women had pedicured nails, precision-applied nail polish. Ruth's feet were broad, and her naked toes looked like the piggies from the children's rhyme. Even the man next to her had better-looking feet, smooth skin, perfectly tapered toes. And then she caught herself-she shouldn't have nice thoughts about the feet of a potential pervert.

The class started with what sounded like a cult incantation, followed by poses that seemed to be saluting a heathen god. "Urdhva Muka Svanasana! Adho Muka Svanasana!" Everyone except Ruth and Wendy knew the routines. Ruth followed along as if she were playing Simon Says. Every now and then the yoga teacher, a ropy-muscled woman, walked by and casually bent, tilted, or lifted a part of Ruth's body. I probably look like a torture victim, Ruth thought, or one of those freaks my mother saw in China, boneless beggar boys who twisted themselves up for the amusement of others. By this time she was perspiring heavily and had observed enough about the man next to her to be able to describe him to the police, if necessary. "The nude yoga rapist was five-eleven, maybe a hundred and sixty pounds. He had dark hair, large brown eyes and thick eyebrows, a neatly cropped beard and mustache. His fingernails were clean, perfectly trimmed."

He was also incredibly limber. He could wrap his ankles around his neck, balance like Baryshnikov. She, in comparison, looked like a woman getting a gynecological exam. A poor woman. She was wearing an old T-shirt and faded leggings with a hole in one knee. At least it was obvious she wasn't on the prowl, not like those who were wearing designer sports outfits and full makeup.

And then she noticed the man's ring, a thick band of hammered gold on his right hand, no ring on his left. Not all married men wore rings, of course, but a wedding band on the right hand was a dead giveaway, at least in San Francisco, that he was gay. Now that she thought about it, the signs were obvious: the neat beard, the trim torso, the graceful way he moved. She could relax. She watched the bearded man bend forward, grab the bottoms of his feet, and press his forehead to his knees. No straight man could do that. Ruth flopped over and dangled her hands to midcalf.

Toward the end of the class came the headstands. The novices moved to the wall, the competitive types rose immediately like sunflowers toward the noon sun. There was no more room at the wall, so Ruth simply sat on her mat. A moment later, she heard the bearded man speak: "Need some help? I can hold on to your ankles until you get balanced."

"Thanks, but I'll pass. I'm afraid I'd get a cerebral hemorrhage."

He smiled. "Do you always live in such a dangerous world?"

"Always. Life's more exciting that way."

"Well, the headstand is one of the most important postures you can do. Being upside down can turn your life around. It can make you happy."

"Really?"

"See? You're already laughing."

"You win," she said, placing the crown of her head on a folded blanket. "Hoist away."

Within the first week, Wendy was off yoga and onto a home gizmo that looked like a rickshaw with oars. Ruth continued with yoga three times a week. She had found a form of exercise that relaxed her. She especially liked the practice of staying focused, of eliminating everything from her mind except breath. And she liked Art, the bearded man. He was friendly and funny. They started going to a coffee shop around the corner after class.

Over decaf cappuccinos one evening, she learned that Art had grown up in New York, and had a doctorate in linguistics from UC Berkeley. "So what languages do you speak?" she asked.

"I'm not a true polyglot," he said. "Most linguists I know aren't. My actual language specialty at Berkeley was American Sign Language, ASL. I now work at the Center on Deafness at UCSF."

"You became an expert on silence?" she joked.

"I'm not an expert on anything. But I love language in all forms- sounds and words, facial expressions, hand gestures, body posture and its rhythms, what people mean but don't necessarily say with words. I've always loved words, the power of them."

"So what's your favorite word?"

"Hm, that's an excellent question." He fell quiet, stroking his beard in thought.

Ruth was thrilled. He was probably groping for a word that was arcane and multisyllabic, one of those crossword items that could be confirmed only in the Oxford English Dictionary.

"Vapors," he said at last.

"Vapors?" Ruth thought of chills and cold, mists and suicide ghosts. That was not a word she would have chosen.

"It appeals to all the senses," he explained. "It can be opaque but never solid. You can feel it, but it has no permanent shape. It might be hot or cold. Some vapors smell terrible, others quite wonderful. Some are dangerous, others are harmless. Some are brighter than others when burned, mercury versus sodium, for instance. Vapors can go up your nose with a sniff and permeate your lungs. And the sound of the word, how it forms on your lips, teeth, and tongue-vaporzzzzzz-it lilts up, then lingers and fades. It's perfectly matched to its meanings."

"It is," Ruth agreed. "Vaporzzzz," she echoed, savoring the buzz on her tongue.

"And then there's vapor pressure," Art continued, "and reaching that balance point between two states, one hundred degrees Celsius." Ruth nodded and gave him what she hoped was a look of intelligent concentration. She felt dull and badly educated. "One moment you have water," Art said, his hands forming undulating motions. "But under pressure from heat, it turns into steam." His fingers flittered upward.

Ruth nodded vigorously. Water to steam, that she understood, sort of. Her mother used to talk about fire and water combining to make steam, and steam looked harmless but could peel your skin right off. "Like yin and yang?" she ventured.

"Duality of nature. Exactly."

Ruth shrugged. She felt like a fraud.

"What about you?" he said. "What's your favorite word?"

She put on her idiot face. "Gosh oh golly, there are so many! Let's see. 'Vacation.' 'Jackpot.' Then there's 'free.' ' Sale.' 'Bargain.' You know, the usual."

He had laughed throughout, and she felt pleased. "Seriously," he said. "What?"

Seriously? She plucked at what surfaced in her mind, but they sounded trite: peace, love, happiness. And what would those words say about her? That she lacked those qualities? That she had no imagination? She considered saying onomatopoeia, a word that had enabled her to win a spelling bee in the fifth grade. But onomatopoeia was a jumble of syllables, not at all like the simple sounds it was supposed to represent. Crash, boom, bang.

"I don't have a favorite yet," she finally answered. "I guess I've been living off words for so long it's hard to think about them beyond what's utilitarian."

"What do you do?"

"I used to be in corporate communications. Then I started freelance editing, and a few years ago I took on more full-scale book collaboration, mostly inspirational and self-improvement books, better health, better sex, better soul, that kind of thing."

"You're a book doctor."

Ruth liked that he said that. Book doctor. She had never called herself that, nor had anyone else. Most people called her a ghostwriter-she hated the term. Her mother thought it meant that she could actually write to ghosts. "Yes," she told Art. "I suppose you could say that, book doctor. But I tend to think of myself as more of a translator, helping people transfer what's in their brain onto the blank page. Some books need more help than others."

"Have you ever wanted to write your own book?"

She hesitated. Of course she had. She wanted to write a novel in the style of Jane Austen, a book of manners about the upper class, a book that had nothing to do with her own life. Years before, she had dreamed of writing stories as a way to escape. She could revise her life and become someone else. She could be somewhere else. In her imagination she could change everything, herself, her mother, her past. But the idea of revising her life also frightened her, as if by imagination alone she were condemning what she did not like about herself or others. Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.

"I suppose most people want to write their own book," she answered. "But I think I'm better at translating what others want to say."

"And you enjoy that? It's satisfying?"

"Yes. Absolutely. There's still a lot of freedom to do what I want."

"You're lucky."

"I am," she conceded. "I certainly am."

It pleased her to discuss such matters with him. With Wendy she tended to talk about peeves more than passions. They commiserated on rampant misogyny, bad manners, and depressed mothers, whereas Art and she talked to discover new things about themselves and each other. He wanted to know what inspired her, what the difference was between her hopes and her goals, her beliefs and her motivations.

"Difference?" she asked.

"Some things you do for yourself," he answered. "Some things you do for others. Maybe they're the same."

Through such conversations, she realized for instance that she was lucky to be a freelance editor, a book doctor. The discoveries were refreshing.

One evening, about three weeks after she met him, their conversation became more personal. "Frankly, I like living alone," she heard herself saying. She had convinced herself this was true.

"And what if you met the ideal partner?"

"He can stay ideal in his place, and I'll stay ideal in mine. Then we won't get into all that shit about whose pubic hair is clogging up the drain."

Art chuckled. "God! Did you actually live with someone who complained about that?

Ruth forced a laugh, staring into her coffee cup. She was the one who had complained. "We were opposites about cleanliness," she answered. "Thank God we didn't marry." As she said this, she sensed the words were at last true and not a cover-up for pain.

"So you were going to marry."

She had never been able to confide fully to anyone, not even Wendy, about what had happened with her and Paul Shinn. She had told Wendy of the many ways Paul irked her, that she was tempted to break up with him. When she announced to Wendy that they had split up, Wendy exclaimed, "Finally you did it. Good for you." With Art, the past seemed easier to talk about, because he had not been part of it. He was her yoga buddy, on the periphery of her life. He did not know what her earlier hopes and fears had been. With him, she could dissect the past with emotional detachment and frank intelligence.

"We thought about marriage," she said. "How can you not when you live together for four years? But you know what? Over time, passion wanes, differences don't. One day he told me he'd put in for a transfer to New York and it had come through." Ruth recalled to herself how surprised she had been, and how she complained to Paul about his not telling her sooner. "Of course, I can work almost anywhere," she had told him, annoyed yet excited at the prospect of moving to Manhattan, "but it's a jolt to uproot, not to mention leave my mother behind, and relocate in a city where I don't have any contacts. Why'd you tell me at the last minute?" She had meant that rhetorically. Then came Paul's awkward silence.

"I didn't ask to go, he didn't ask me to come," she told Art simply. She avoided eye contact. "It was a civil way to break up. We both agreed it was time to move on, only separately. He was decent enough to try to put the blame on himself. Said he was immature, whereas I was more responsible." She gave Art a goofy grin, as if this were the most ironic thing anyone could have said about her. "The worst part was, he was so nice about it-like he was embarrassed to have to do this to me. And naturally, I spent the last year trying to analyze what it was about us, about me, that didn't work. I went over just about every argument that we'd had. I had said he was careless, he said I made simple problems have difficult solutions. I said he never planned, he said I obsessed to the point of killing all spontaneity. I thought he was selfish, he said I worried over him to the point of suffocation, then pitied myself when he didn't fall all over himself saying thank you. And maybe we were both right and that was why we were wrong for each other."

Art touched her hand. "Well, I think he lost a terrific woman."

She was flooded with self-consciousness and gratitude.

"You are. You're terrific. You're honest and funny. Smart, interested."

"Don't forget responsible."

"What's wrong with being responsible? I wish more people were. And you know what else? You're willing to be vulnerable. I think that's endearing."

"Aw, shucks."

"Seriously."

"Well, that's sweet of you to say. I'll buy you coffee next time." She laughed and put her hand over his. "How about you? Tell me about your love life and all your past disasters. Who's your current partner?"

"I don't have one right now. Half the time I live alone, the other half I'm picking up toys and making jelly sandwiches for my two daughters."

This was a surprise. "You adopted them?"

He looked puzzled. "They're mine. And my ex-wife's, of course."

Ex-wife? That made three gay men she knew who had once been married. "So how long were you married before you came out?"

"Came out?" He made a screwy face. "Wait a minute. Do you think I'm gay?"

In an instant, she knew her mistake. "Of course not!" she scrambled to say. "I meant when you came out from New York."

He was laughing convulsively. "This whole time you thought I wasgay?"

Ruth flushed. What had she said! "It was the ring," she admitted, and pointed to his gold band. "Most of the gay couples I know wear rings on that hand."

He slipped off the ring and rotated it in the light. "My best friend made it for my wedding," Art said solemnly. "Ernesto, a rare spirit. He was a poet and a goldsmith by avocation, made his living as a limo driver. See these indentations? He told me they were to remind me that there are a lot of bumps in life and that I should remember what lies between them. Love, friendship, hope. I stopped wearing it when Miriam and I split up. Then Ernesto died, brain cancer. I decided to wear the ring to remind me of him, what he said. He was a good friend-but not a lover."

He slid the ring over to Ruth so she could see the details. She picked it up. It was heavier than she had thought. She held it to her eye and looked through its center at Art. He was so gentle. He was not judgmental. She felt a squeezing in her heart that both hurt her and made her want to giggle and shout. How could she not love him?

As she gathered up Art's clothes at the dry cleaner's, Ruth flexed her big toe and remembered she was supposed to call Wendy. Mrs. Scott and a boy toy, what a shock. She decided to wait until she was in the parking lot by the grocery store, rather than risk a head-on collision during a juicy cell-phone conversation.

She and Wendy were the same age. They had known each other since the sixth grade, but had gone through periods when they did not see each other for years. Their friendship had grown via accidental reunions and persistence on Wendy's part. While Wendy was not the person Ruth would have chosen for her closest friend, Ruth was glad it had turned out to be so. She needed Wendy's boisterousness as balance to her own caution, Wendy's bluntness as antidote to her reserve. "Stop being such a worrywort," Wendy often ordered. Or "You don't always have to act so fucking polite," she might say. "You're making me look like shit."

Wendy answered on the first ring. "Can you believe it?" she said, as though she had not stopped repeating this since their last conversation. "And I thought she was over the top when she had the facelift. Last night she told me that she and Patrick were getting it on twice a night. She's telling me this-me, the daughter she once sent to confession for asking how babies were made."

Ruth imagined Mrs. Scott taking off her Chanel suit, her trifocals, her diamond-encrusted designer crucifix, then embracing her beach boy.

"She's getting more sex than I am," Wendy exclaimed. "I can't remember the last time I even wanted to do anything in bed with Joe except sleep."

Wendy had often joked about her dwindling sex drive. But Ruth didn't think she meant it was absent. Would this happen to her as well? She and Art were not exactly the red-hot lovers they'd been in earlier years. They prepared less for romance and accepted more readily excuses of fatigue. She wiggled a toe: Get estrogen levels checked. That might be the reason she felt a sense of unease, fluctuating hormones. She had no other reason to feel anxious. Not that her life was perfect, but whatever problems she had, they were small. And she should keep them that way. She vowed to be more affectionate with Art.

"I can see why you're upset," Ruth consoled her.

"Actually, I'm more worried than upset," Wendy said. "It's just weird. It's like the older she gets, the younger she acts. And part of me says, Good for her, you go, girl. And the other part is like, Whoa. Is she crazy or what? Do I have to watch over her now, act like her mother and make sure she doesn't get herself in trouble? You know what I mean?"

"I've been that way with my mother all my life," Ruth said. Suddenly she remembered what had been eluding her. Her mother was supposed to see the doctor at four this afternoon. Over the past year, Ruth had been vaguely worried about her mother's health. Nothing was terribly wrong; it was just that LuLing seemed slightly off, hazy. For a while, Ruth had reasoned that her mother was tired, that her hearing might be going, or that her English was getting worse. As a precaution, Ruth had also gnawed over the worst possibilities-brain tumor, Alzheimer's, stroke- believing this would ensure that it was not these things. History had always proven that she worried for nothing. But a few weeks before, when her mother mentioned she had an appointment for a checkup, Ruth said she would drive her.

After she and Wendy finished their conversation, Ruth stepped out of the car and walked toward the grocery store, still thinking. Nine, Mom's doctor. And she started to count on her ringers the questions she should ask the doctor. Thank God she could speak once again.

TWO

In the vegetable aisle, Ruth headed toward a bin of beautifully shaped turnips. They were each the size of apples, symmetrical and scrubbed, with striations of purple. Most people did not appreciate the aesthetics of turnips, Ruth thought as she chose five good ones, whereas she loved them, their crunchiness, the way they absorbed the flavor of whatever they were immersed in, gravy or pickling juice. She loved cooperative vegetables. And she loved turnips best when they were sliced into wedges and preserved in vinegar and chilies, sugar and salt.

Every year, before their family reunion dinner in September, her mother started two new fermenting jars of spicy turnips, one of which she gave to Ruth. When Ruth was a little girl, she called them la-la, hot-hot. She would suck and munch on them until her tongue and lips felt inflamed and swollen. She still gorged on them from time to time. Was it a craving for salt, or for pain? When the supply grew low, Ruth would toss in more chopped-up turnips and a pinch of salt, and let them pickle for a few days. Art thought the taste was okay in small doses. But the girls said they smelled like "something farted in the fridge." At times Ruth secretly ate the spicy turnips in the morning, her way of seizing the day. Even her mother considered that strange.

Her mother-and Ruth tapped her ring finger to remind herself again of the doctor's appointment. Four o'clock. She had to squeeze a lot of work into the shortened day. She hurried, grabbing Fuji apples for Fia, Granny Smiths for Dory, Braeburns for Art.

At the meat counter, she evaluated the options. Dory would not eat anything with eyes, and ever since seeing that pig movie Babe, Fia had been trying to be a vegetarian. Both girls made an exception for fish, because seafood was "not cute." When they announced that, Ruth said to them, "Just because something isn't cute, is its life worth less? If a girl wins a beauty contest, is she better than a girl who doesn't?" And Fia scrunched up her face and replied: "What are you talking about? Fish don't enter beauty contests."

Ruth now pushed her cart toward the fish counter. She longed for prawns in the shell, always her first choice. Art wouldn't eat them, however. He claimed that the predominant taste of any crustacean or mollusk was that of its alimentary tract. She settled on Chilean sea bass. "That one," she told the man at the counter. Then she reconsidered: "Actually, give me the bigger one." She might as well ask her mother to dinner, since they were already going to the doctor's together. LuLing was always complaining she didn't like to cook for just herself.

At the checkout counter, Ruth saw a woman in front of her scoop up bunches of ivory- and peach-colored tulips, at least fifty dollars' worth. Ruth was amazed at how some people casually bought flowers as household staples, as if they were as necessary as toilet paper. And tulips, of all choices! They wilted and dropped their petals after a few days. Was the woman having an important dinner party on a weeknight? When Ruth bought flowers, she had to assess their value in several ways to justify what she bought. Daisies were cheerful and cheap, but they had an unpleasant smell. Baby's breath was even cheaper, but as Gideon pointed out, it was the lowest of floral low taste, what old queens used, along with lace doilies they inherited from their grandmothers. Tuberoses smelled wonderful and gave an architectural touch, but they were expensive at this store, nearly four dollars a stalk. At the flower mart, they were only a dollar. She liked hydrangeas in a pot. They were making a comeback, and while they cost a lot, they lasted a month or two, if you remembered to water them. The trick was to cut them before they died, then let them dry in a pottery pitcher, so you could keep them as a permanent floral arrangement, that is, until someone like Art threw them out, citing that they were already dead.

Ruth had not grown up with flowers in the house. She could not remember LuLing ever buying them. She had not thought this a deprivation until the day she went grocery shopping with Auntie Gal and her cousins. At the supermarket in Saratoga, ten-year-old Ruth had watched as they dumped into the cart whatever struck their fancy at the moment, all kinds of good things Ruth was never allowed to eat: chocolate milk, doughnuts, TV dinners, ice cream sandwiches, Hostess Twinkles. Later they stopped at a little stand where Auntie Gal bought cut flowers, pink baby roses, even though nobody had died or was having a birthday.

Remembering this, Ruth decided to splurge and buy a small orchid plant with ivory blooms. Orchids looked delicate but thrived on neglect. You didn't have to water them but once every ten days. And while they were somewhat pricey, they bloomed for six months or more, then went dormant before surprising you with new blooms all over again. They never died-you could count on them to reincarnate themselves forever. A lasting value.

Back at the flat, Ruth put the groceries away, set the orchid on the dining room table, and went into the Cubbyhole. She liked to think that limited space inspired limitless imagination. The walls were painted red with flecks of metallic gold, Wendy's idea. The overhead light was softened by a desk lamp with an amber mica shade. On the lacquer-black shelves were reference books instead of jars of jam. A pull-out cutting board held her laptop, a flour bin had been removed for knee space.

She turned on her computer and felt drained before she even started. What was she doing ten years ago? The same thing. What would she be doing ten years from now? The same thing. Even the subjects of the books she helped write were not that different, only the buzzwords had changed. She took a deep breath and phoned the new client, Ted. His book, Internet Spirituality, was about the ethics created by cosmic computer connections, a topic he felt sure was hot right now but would lose its cachet if the publisher didn't get it to market as soon as possible. He had said so in several urgent phone messages he had left over the weekend when Ruth was in Tahoe.

"I have nothing to do with arranging publishing dates," Ruth now tried to explain.

"Stop thinking in terms of constraints," he told her. "If you write this book with me, you have to believe in its principles. Anything is possible, as long as it's for the good of the world. Make the exception. Live exceptionally. And if you can't do that, maybe we should consider whether you're right for this project. Think about it, then let's talk tomorrow."

Ruth hung up. She thought about it. The good of the world, she muttered to herself, was her agent's job. She would warn Gideon that the client was pushy and might try to change the publication date. She would stand firm this time. To do what the client wanted while meeting her other commitments would require her to work 'round the clock. Fifteen years earlier she could have done that-in the days when she also smoked cigarettes and equated busyness with feeling wanted. Not now. Untense the muscles, she reminded herself. She took another deep breath and exhaled as she stared at the shelves of books she had helped edit and write.

The Cult of Personal Freedom. The Cult of Compassion. The Cult of Envy.

The Biology of Sexual Attraction. The Physics of Human Nature. The Geography of the Soul.

The Yin and Yang of Being Single. The Yin and Yang of Being Married. The Yin and Yang of Being Divorced.

The most popular books were Defeat Depression with Dogs, Procrastinate to Your Advantage, and To Hell with Guilt. The last book had become a controversial bestseller. It had even been translated into German and Hebrew.

In the coauthoring trade, "Ruth Young" was the small-type name that followed "with," that is, if it appeared at all. After fifteen years, she had nearly thirty-five books to her credit. Most of her early work had come from corporate communications clients. Her expertise had woven its way into communication in general, then communication problems, behavioral patterns, emotional problems, mind-body connections, and spiritual awakening. She had been in the business long enough to see the terms evolve from "chakras" to "ch'i," "prana," "vital energy," "life force," "biomagnetic force," "bioenergy fields," and finally back to "chakras." In bookstores, most of her clients' words of wisdom were placed in the light or popular sections-Self-Help, Wellness, Inspirational, New Age. She wished she were working on books that would be categorized as Philosophy, Science, Medicine.

By and large, the books she helped write were interesting, she often reminded herself, and if not, it was her job to make them interesting. And though she might pooh-pooh her own work just to be modest, it irked her when others did not take her seriously. Even Art did not seem to recognize how difficult her job was. But that was partly her fault. She preferred to make it look easy. She would rather that others discern for themselves what an incredible job she did in spinning gold out of dross. They never did, of course. They didn't know how hard it was to be diplomatic, to excavate lively prose from incoherent musings. She had to assure clients that her straightforward recasting of their words still made them sound articulate, intelligent, and important. She had to be sensitive to the fact the authors saw their books as symbolic forms of immortality, believing that their words on the printed page would last far longer than their physical bodies. And when the books were published, Ruth had to sit back quietly at parties while the clients took the credit for being brilliant. She often claimed she did not need to be acknowledged to feel satisfied, but that was not exactly true. She wanted some recognition, and not like the kind she had received two weeks before, at the party for her mother's seventy-seventh birthday.

Auntie Gal and Uncle Edmund had brought along a friend from Portland, an older woman with thick glasses, who asked Ruth what she did for a living. "I'm a book collaborator," she answered.

"Why you say that?" LuLing scolded. "Sound bad, like you traitor and spy."

Auntie Gal then said with great authority, "She's a ghostwriter, one of the best there is. You know those books that say 'as told to' on the cover? That's what Ruth does-people tell her stories and she writes them down, word for word, exactly as told." Ruth had no time to correct her.

"Like court stenographers," the woman said. "I hear they have to be very fast and accurate. Did you go through special training?"

Before Ruth could answer, Auntie Gal chirped: "Ruthie, you should tell my story! Very exciting, plus all true. But I don't know if you can keep up. I'm a pretty fast talker!"

Now LuLing jumped in: "Not just type, lots work!" And Ruth was grateful for this unexpected defense, until her mother added, "She correct spelling too!"

Ruth looked up from her notes on her phone conference with the Internet Spirituality author and reminded herself of all the ways she was lucky. She worked at home, was paid decent money, and at least the publishers appreciated her, as did the publicists, who called her for talking points when booking radio interviews for the authors. She was always busy, unlike some freelance writers who fretted over the trickle of jobs in the pipeline.

"So busy, so success," her mother had said recently when Ruth told her she didn't have any free time to see her. "Not free," LuLing added, "because every minute must charge money. What I should pay you, five dollar, ten dollar, then you come see me?" The truth was, Ruth did not have much free time, not in her opinion. Free time was the most precious time, when you should be doing what you loved, or at least slowing down enough to remember what made your life worthwhile and happy. Her free time was usually usurped by what seemed at the time urgent and later unnecessary. Wendy said the same thing: "Free time doesn't exist anymore. It has to be scheduled with a dollar amount attached to it. You're under this constant pressure to get your money's worth out of rest, relaxation, and restaurants that are hard to get into." After hearing that, Ruth didn't agonize as much over time constraints. It wasn't her fault she didn't have enough time to do what was necessary. The problem was universal. But try explaining that to her mother.

She pulled out her notes for chapter seven of Agapi Agnos's latest book, Righting the Wronged Child, and punched Agapi's number. Ruth was one of the few people who knew that Agapi's real name was Doris DeMatteo, that she had chosen her pseudonym because agapi meant "love" and agnos referred to ignorance, which she redefined as a form of innocence. That was how she signed her books, "Love Innocence, Agapi Agnos." Ruth enjoyed working with her. Though Agapi was a psychiatrist, she didn't come across as intimidating. She knew that much of her appeal was her Zsa Zsa Gabor shtick, her accent, the flirtatious yet intelligent personality she exuded when she answered questions in TV and radio interviews.

During their phone meeting, Ruth reviewed the chapter that presented the Five Don'ts and Ten Do's of becoming a more engaged parent.

"Darling," Agapi said, "why does it always have to be a list of five and ten? I can't always limit myself to such regular numbers."

"It's just easier for people to remember in series of fives and tens," Ruth answered. "I read a study somewhere about that." Hadn't she? "It probably has to do with counting on our fingers."

"That makes perfect sense, my dear! I knew there was a reason."

After they hung up, Ruth began work on a chapter titled "No Child Is an Island." She replayed a tape of Agapi and herself talking:

"…A parent, intentionally or not, imposes a cosmology on the little child-" Agapi paused. "You want to say something?" What cue had she given that let Agapi know she wanted to add a thought? Ruth seldom interrupted people.

"We should define 'cosmology' here," she heard herself say, "perhaps in a sidebar. We don't want people to think we 're talking about cosmetics or astrology."

"Yes, yes, excellent point, my dear. Cosmology, let's see… what we believe, subconsciously, implicitly, or both, how the universe works-you want to add something?"

"Readers will think we mean planets or the Big Bang theory."

"You are such a cynic! All right, you write the definition, but just include something about how each of us fits into our families, society, the communities we come into contact with. Talk about those various roles, as well as how we believe we got them-whether it's destiny, fate, luck, chance, self-determination, et cetera, et cetera. Oh, and Ruth, darling, make it sound sexy and easy to grasp."

"No problem."

"All right, so we assume everyone understands cosmology. We go on to say that parents pass along this cosmology to children through their behaviors, their reactions to daily events, often mundane- You look puzzled."

"Examples of mundane."

"Mealtime, for instance. Perhaps dinner always happens at six and Mom is an elaborate planner, dinner is a ritual, but nothing happens, no talk, unless it's argument. Or meals are eaten catch-as-catch-can. With just these contrasts, the child might grow up thinking either that day and night are predictable, though not always pleasant, or that the world is chaotic, frantic, or freely evolving. Some children do beautifully, no matter what the early influences. Whereas others grow up into great big adults who require a lifetime of very, very expensive psychotherapy."

Ruth listened to their laughter on the tape. She had never gone into therapy, as Wendy had. She worked with too many therapists, saw that they were human, full of foibles, in need of help themselves. And while Wendy thought it worthwhile to know that a professional was dedicated to her and her alone for two one-hour sessions a week, Ruth could not justify spending a hundred fifty dollars an hour to listen to herself talk. Wendy often said Ruth should see a shrink about her compulsion with number counting. To Ruth, however, the counting was practical, not compulsive; it had to do with remembering things, not warding off some superstitious nonsense.

"Ruth, darling," Agapi's taped voice continued, "can you look at the folder marked 'Fascinating Case Studies' and pick out suitable ones for this chapter?"

"Okay. And I was thinking, how about including a section on the cosmology imparted by television as artificial caregiver? Just a suggestion, since it would probably also work as an angle for television shows and radio interviews."

"Yes, yes, wonderful! What shows do you think we should do?"

"Well, starting with the fifties, you know, Howdy Doody, The Mickey Mouse Club, all the way to The Simpsons and South Park -"

"No, dear, I mean what shows I might be on. Sixty Minutes, Today, Charlie Rose-oh, I would love to be on that show, that man is so sexy…"

Ruth took notes and started an outline. No doubt Agapi would call her that night to discuss what she had written. Ruth suspected she was the only writer in the business who believed a deadline was an actual date.

Her watch sounded at eleven. She tapped her finger, Eight, call Gideon. When she reached him, she began with the demands of the Internet Spirituality author. "Ted wants me to push everything else aside and make his project top priority under rush deadlines. I was very firm about saying I couldn't do that, and he hinted pretty strongly that he might replace me with another writer. Frankly, I'd be relieved if he fired me," Ruth said. She was preparing herself for rejection.

"He never will," Gideon replied. "You'll cave in, you always do. You'll probably be calling HarperSanFrancisco by the end of the week, persuading them to change the schedule."

"What makes you say that?"

"Face it, sweetheart, you're accommodating. Willing to bend over backward. And you have this knack for making even the dickheads believe they're the best at what they do."

"Watch it," Ruth said. "That's a hooker you're describing."

"It's true. You're a dream when it comes to collaboration," Gideon went on. "You listen as the clients blather on, egos unchecked. They walk all over you, and you just take it. You're easy."

Why wasn't Art hearing this? Ruth wanted to gloat: See, others don't think I'm difficult. Then she realized Gideon was saying she was a pushover. She wasn't really, she reasoned. She knew her limits, but she wasn't the type to get into a conflict over things that were ultimately not that important. She didn't understand people who thrived on argument and being right all the time. Her mother was that way, and what did that get her? Nothing but unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and anger. According to her mother's cosmology, the world was against her and no one could change this, because this was a curse.

But the way Ruth saw it, LuLing got into fights mainly because of her poor English. She didn't understand others, or they didn't understand her. Ruth used to feel she was the one who suffered because of that. The irony was, her mother was actually proud she had taught herself English, the choppy talk she had acquired in China and Hong Kong. And since immigrating to the United States fifty years before, she had not improved either her pronunciation or her vocabulary. Yet her sister, GaoLing, had come to the States around the same time, and her English was nearly perfect. She could talk about the difference between crinoline and organza, name the specific trees she liked: oak, maple, gingko, pine. To LuLing, cloth was classified as "cost too much," "too slippery," "scratchy skin," and "last long time." And there were only two kinds of trees: "shady" and "drop leaf all the time." Her mother couldn't even say Ruth's name right. It used to mortify Ruth when she shouted for her up and down the block. "Lootie! Lootie!" Why had her mother chosen a name with sounds she couldn't pronounce?

But this was the worst part: Being the only child of a widow, Ruth had always been forced to serve as LuLing's mouthpiece. By the time she was ten, Ruth was the English-speaking "Mrs. LuLing Young" on the telephone, the one who made appointments for the doctor, who wrote letters to the bank. Once she even had to compose a humiliating letter to the minister.

"Lootie give me so much trouble," LuLing dictated, as if Ruth were invisible, "maybe I send her go Taiwan, school for bad children. What you think?"

Ruth revised that to: "Perhaps Ruth might attend a finishing school in Taiwan where she can learn the manners and customs of a young lady. What is your opinion?"

In an odd way, she now thought, her mother was the one who had taught her to become a book doctor. Ruth had to make life better by revising it.

At three-ten, Ruth finished paying the plumber. Art had never come home, nor had he called. A whole new water heater was needed, not just a replacement part. And because of the leak, the plumber had had to shut off the electricity to the entire flat until he had suctioned out the standing water and removed the old tank. Ruth had been unable to work.

She was running late. She faxed the outline to Agapi, then raced around the house, gathering notes, her cell phone, her address book. Once in the car, she drove to the Presidio Gate and then through the eucalyptus forest to California Street. Her mother lived fifty blocks west, in a part of San Francisco known as the Sunset district, close to Land's End.

The doctor's appointment was ostensibly a routine visit. Her mother had overlooked having an annual checkup for the last few years, though it was included free in her HMO plan. LuLing was never sick. Ruth could not remember the last time she had had the flu or even a cold. At seventy-seven, her mother had none of the common geriatric problems, arthritis, high cholesterol, or osteoporosis. Her worst ailment-the one she frequently complained about to Ruth, in excruciating detail-was constipation.

Recently, though, Ruth had some concerns that her mother was becoming not forgetful, exactly, but careless. She would say "ribbon" when she meant "wrapping paper," "envelope" when she meant "stamp." Ruth had made a mental list of examples to tell the doctor. The accident last March, she should mention that as well. LuLing had bashed her car into the back of a truck. Luckily, she had only bumped her head on the steering wheel, and no one else was hurt. Her car was totaled.

"Scare me to pieces," LuLing had reported. "My skin almost fall off." She blamed a pigeon that had flown up in front of her windshield. Maybe, Ruth now considered, it was not a nutter of wings, but one in her brain, a stroke, and the bump on her head was more serious, a concussion, a skull fracture. Whatever was wrong, the police report and insurance company said it was LuLing's fault, not the pigeon's. LuLing was so outraged that she canceled her car insurance, then complained when the company refused to reinstate her policy.

Ruth had related the incident to Agapi Agnos, who said inattention and anger could be related to depression in the elderly.

"My mother's been depressed and angry all her life," Ruth told Agapi. She did not bring up the threats of suicide, which she had heard so often she tried not to react to them.

"I know of some excellent therapists who've worked with Chinese patients," Agapi said. "Quite good with cultural differences-magical thinking, old societal pressures, the flow of ch'i."

"Believe me, Agapi, my mother is not like other Chinese people." Ruth used to wish her mother were more like Auntie Gal. She didn't talk about ghosts or bad luck or ways she might die.

"In any case, my dear, you should have a doctor give her a thorough, thorough checkup. And you put your arms around her and give that mother of yours a great big healing hug from me." It was a nice thought, but Ruth rarely exchanged embraces with LuLing. When she tried, her mother's shoulders turned rigid, as if she were being attacked.

Driving toward LuLing's building, Ruth entered the typical fog of summer. Then came block after block of bungalows built in the twenties, cottages that sprang up in the thirties, and characterless apartments from the sixties. The ocean view skyline was marred by electrical wires strewn from pole to house and house to pole. Many of the picture windows had sea-misty smears. The drainpipes and gutters were rusted, as were the bumpers of old cars. She turned up a street lined with more upscale homes, architectural attempts at Bauhaus sleekness, their small lawns dec orated with shrubs cut in odd shapes, like the cotton-candy legs of show poodles.

She pulled up to LuLing's place, a two-unit Mediterranean-style with an apricot-colored curved front and a fake bay window balcony with wrought-iron grating. LuLing had once proudly tended her yard. She used to water and cut the hedge herself, neaten the border of white stones that flanked the short walkway. When Ruth lived at home, she had had to mow the seven-by-seven foot squares of lawn. LuLing always criticized any edges that touched the sidewalk. She also complained about the yellow urine spots, made by the dog from across the street. "Lootie, you tell that man don't let dog do that." Ruth reluctantly went across the street, knocked on the door, asked the neighbor if he had seen a black-and-white cat, then walked back and told her mother that the man said he would try. When she went away to college and came home to visit, her mother still asked her to complain to the man across the street almost as soon as she walked in the door. The missing-cat routine was getting old, and it was hard to think of new excuses for knocking on the man's door. Ruth usually procrastinated, and LuLing nagged about more and more yellow spots, as well as Ruth's laziness, her forgetfulness, her lack of concern for family, on and on. Ruth tried to ignore her by reading or watching TV.

One day Ruth worked up the courage to tell LuLing she should hire a lawyer to sue the man or a gardener to fix the lawn. Her college roommate had suggested she say this, telling Ruth she was crazy to let her mother push her around as if she were still six years old.

"Is she paying you to be a punching bag?" her roommate had said, building the case.

"Well, she does give me money for college expenses," Ruth admitted.

"Yeah, but every parent does that. They're supposed to. But that doesn't give them the right to make you their slave."

Thus bolstered, Ruth confronted her mother: "If it bothers you so much, you take care of it."

LuLing stared at her, silent for five full minutes. Then she burst like a geyser: "You wish I dead? You wish no mother tell you what to do? Okay, maybe I die soon!" And just like that, Ruth had been upended, flung about, was unable to keep her balance. LuLing's threats to die were like earthquakes. Ruth knew that the potential was there, that beneath the surface, the temblors could occur at any time. And despite this knowledge, when they erupted she panicked and wanted to run away before the world fell down.

Strangely, after that incident, LuLing never mentioned anything about the dog peeing on the lawn. Instead, whenever Ruth came home, LuLing made it a point to take out a spade, get on her hands and knees, and painfully dig out the yellow spots and reseed them, two square inches at a time. Ruth knew it was her mother's version of emotional torture, but still it made her stomach hurt as she pretended not to be affected. LuLing finally did hire someone to take care of the yellow spots, a cement contractor, who constructed a frame and a mold, then poured a patio of red and white concrete diamonds. The walkway was red as well. Over the years, the red diamonds faded. The white ones turned grimy. Some areas looked as though they had experienced the upheavals of Lilliputian volcanos. Spiny weeds and strawlike tufts grew in the cracks. I should call someone to spruce up the place, Ruth thought as she approached the house. She was sad that her mother no longer cared as much about appearances. She also felt guilty that she had not helped out more around the house. Perhaps she could call her own handyman to do cleanup and repairs.

As Ruth neared the steps to the upper unit, the downstairs tenant stepped out of her doorway, signaling that she wanted to speak to her. Francine was an anorexically thin woman in her thirties, who seemed to be wearing a size-eight skin over a size-two body. She often griped to Ruth about repairs needed for the building: The electricity kept shorting out. The smoke detectors were old and should be replaced. The back steps were uneven and could cause an accident-and a lawsuit.

"Never satisfy!" LuLing told Ruth.

Ruth knew not to take sides with the tenant. But she worried that there might really be a problem like a fire one day, and she dreaded the headlines "Slum Landlady Jailed, Ignored Deadly Hazards." So Ruth surreptitiously handled some of the more resolvable problems. When she bought Francine a new smoke detector, LuLing found out and became apoplectic. "You think she right, I wrong?" As had happened throughout Ruth's childhood, LuLing's fury escalated until she could barely speak, except to sputter the old threat: "Maybe I die soon!"

"You need to talk to your mom," Francine was now saying in a whiny voice. "She's been accusing me of not paying the rent. I always pay on time, the first of the month. I don't know what she's talking about, but she goes on and on, like a broken record."

Ruth had a sinking feeling. She did not want to hear this.

"I even showed her the canceled check. And she said, 'See, you still have the check!' It was weird, like she wasn't making any sense."

"I'll take care of it," Ruth said quietly.

"It's just that she's harassing me like a hundred times a day. It's making me nuts."

"I'll get it straightened out."

"I hope so, because I was just about to call the police to get a restraining order!"

Restraining order? Who's the nut here? "I'm sorry this happened," Ruth said, and remembered a book she helped write on mirroring a child's feelings. "You must be frustrated when it's clear you've done nothing wrong."

It worked. "Okay, then," Francine said, and backed into her doorway like a cuckoo in a Swiss clock.

Ruth used her own key to let herself into her mother's apartment. She heard LuLing call to her: "Why so late?"

Seated in her brown vinyl easy chair, LuLing looked like a petulant child on a throne. Ruth gave her a once-over to see if she could detect anything wrong, a twitch in her eye, a slight paralysis, perhaps, on one side of her face. Nothing, the same old mom. LuLing was wearing a purple cardigan with gold-tone buttons, her favorite, black slacks, and size-four black pumps with low heels. Her hair was smoothed back and gathered like Fia's and Dory's, only she had the ponytail wound into a netted bun, thickened with a hairpiece. Her hair was jet-black, except for the roots at the back, where she could not see that she had failed to apply enough dye. From a distance, she looked like a much younger woman, sixty instead of seventy-seven. Her skin was even-toned and smooth, no need for foundation or powder. You had to stand a foot away before you could see the fine etching of wrinkles on her cheeks. The deepest lines were at the corners of her mouth, which were often turned down, as they were now.

LuLing groused. "You say doctor visit one o'clock."

"I said the appointment was at four."

"No! One o'clock! You say be ready. So I get ready, you don't come!"

Ruth could feel the blood draining out of her head. She tried another tack. "Well, let me call the doctor and see if we can still get in at four." She went to the back, where her mother did her calligraphy and painting, to the room that had been her own long before. On her mother's drawing table lay a large sheet of watercolor paper. Her mother had started a poem-painting, then stopped in mid-character. The brush lay on the paper, its tip dried and stiff. LuLing was not careless. She treated her brushes with fanatical routine, washing them in spring water, not tap, so that chlorine would not damage them. Perhaps she had been in the middle of painting and heard the teakettle crying and bolted. Maybe the phone rang after that, one thing after another. But then Ruth looked closer. Her mother had tried to write the same character over and over again, each time stopping at the same stroke. What character? And why had she stopped in mid-flight?

When Ruth was growing up, her mother supplemented her income as a teacher's aide with side businesses, one of which was bilingual calligraphy, Chinese and English. She produced price signs for supermarkets and jewelry stores in Oakland and San Francisco, good-luck couplets for restaurant openings, banners for funeral wreaths, and announcements for births and weddings. Over the years, people had told Ruth that her mother's calligraphy was at an artist's level, first-rate classical. This was the piecework that earned her a reliable reputation, and Ruth had had a role in that success: she checked the spelling of the English words.

"It's 'grapefruit,'" eight-year-old Ruth once said, exasperated, "not 'grapefoot.' It's a fruit not a foot."

That night, LuLing started teaching her the mechanics of writing Chinese. Ruth knew this was punishment for what she had said earlier.

"Watch," LuLing ordered her in Chinese. She ground an inkstick onto an inkstone and used a medicine dropper to add salt water in doses the size of tears. "Watch," she said, and selected a brush from the dozens hanging with their tips down. Ruth's sleepy eyes tried to follow her mother's hand as she swabbed the brush with ink, then held it nearly perpendicular to the page, her wrist and elbow in midair. Finally she began, flicking her wrist slightly so that her hand waved and dipped like a moth over the gleam of white paper. Soon the spidery images formed: "Half Off!" "Amazing Discounts!" "Going Out of Business!"

"Writing Chinese characters," her mother told her, "is entirely different from writing English words. You think differently. You feel differently." And it was true: LuLing was different when she was writing and painting. She was calm, organized, and decisive.

"Bao Bomu taught me how to write," LuLing said one evening. "She taught me how to think. When you write, she said, you must gather the free-flowing of your heart." To demonstrate, LuLing wrote the character for "heart." "See? Each stroke has its own rhythm, its balance, its proper place. Bao Bomu said everything in life should be the same way."

"Who's Bao Bomu again?" Ruth asked.

"She took care of me when I was a girl. She loved me very much, just like a mother. Bao, well, this means 'precious,' and together with bomu, this means 'Precious Auntie.'" Oh, that Bao Bomu, the crazy ghost. LuLing started to write a simple horizontal line. But the movements were not simple. She rested the tip of the brush on the paper, so it was like a dancer sur les pointes. The tip bent slightly downward, curtsied, and then, as if blown by capricious winds, swept to the right, paused, turned a half-step to the left and rose. Ruth blew out a sigh. Why even try? Her mother would just get upset that she could not do it right.

Some nights LuLing found ways to help Ruth remember the characters. "Each radical comes from an old picture from a long time ago." She made a horizontal stroke and asked Ruth if she could see what the picture was. Ruth squinted and shook her head. LuLing made the identical stroke. Then again and again, asking each time if Ruth knew what it was. Finally, her mother let out a snort, the compressed form of her disappointment and disgust.

"This line is like a beam of light. Look, can you see it or not?"

To Ruth, the line looked like a sparerib picked clean of meat.

LuLing went on: "Each character is a thought, a feeling, meanings, history, all mixed into one." She drew more lines-dots and dashes, downstrokes and upstrokes, bends and hooks. "Do you see this?" she said over and over, tink-tink-tink. "This line, and this and this-the shape of a heavenly temple." And when Ruth shrugged in response, LuLing added, "In the old style of temples," as if this word old would bump the Chinese gears of her daughter's mind into action. Ping-ping! Oh, I see.

Later LuLing had Ruth try her hand at the same character, the whole time stuffing Chinese logic into her resistant brain. "Hold your wrist this way, firm but still loose, like a young willow branch-ai-ya, not collapsed like a beggar lying on the road… Draw the stroke with grace, like a bird landing on a branch, not an executioner chopping off a devil's head. The way you drew it-well, look, the whole thing is falling down. Do it like this… light first, then temple. See? Together, it means 'news from the gods.' See how this knowledge always comes from above? See how Chinese words make sense?"

With Chinese words, her mother did make sense, Ruth now reasoned to herself. Or did she?

She called the doctor and got the nurse. "This is Ruth Young, LuLing Young's daughter. We 're coming to see Dr. Huey for a checkup at four, but I just wanted to mention a few things…" She felt like a collaborator, a traitor and a spy.

When Ruth returned to the living room, she found her mother searching for her purse.

"We don't need any money," Ruth said. "And if we do, I can pay."

"No, no pay! Nobody pay!" LuLing cried. "Inside purse put my health card. I don't show card, doctor charge me extra. Everything suppose be free."

"I'm sure they have your records there. They won't need to see the card."

LuLing kept searching. Abruptly she straightened herself and said, "I know. Leave my purse at GaoLing house. Must be she forget tell me."

"What day did you go?"

"Three days go. Monday."

"Today's Monday."

"How can be Monday? I go three days go, not today!"

"You took BART?" Since the car accident, LuLing had been taking public transportation when Ruth wasn't able to act as chauffeur.

"Yes, and GaoLing late pick me up! I wait two hour. Fin'y she come. And then she accuse me, say, Why you come early, you suppose come here eleven. I tell her, No, I never say come eleven. Why I say coming eleven when I already know I coming nine o'clock? She pretend I crazy, make me so mad."

"Do you think you might have left it on the BART train?"

"Left what?"

"Your purse."

"Why you always take her side?"

"I'm not taking sides…"

"Maybe she keep my purse, don't tell me. She always want my things. Jealous of me. Little-girl time, she want my chipao dress, want my melon fruit, want everybody attention."

The dramas her mother and Auntie had gone through over the years resembled those off-Broadway plays in which two characters perform all the roles: best friends and worst enemies, archrivals and gleeful conspirators. They were only a year apart, seventy-seven and seventy-six, and that closeness seemed to have made them competitive with each other.

The two sisters came to America separately, and married a pair of brothers, sons of a grocer and his wife. LuLing's husband, Edwin Young, was in medical school, and as the elder, he was "destined" as LuLing put it, to be smarter and more successful. Most of the family's attention and privileges had been showered on him. GaoLing's husband, Edmund, the little brother, was in dental school. He was known as the lazy one, the careless boy who would always need a big brother to watch over him. But then big brother Edwin was killed in a hit-and-run car accident while leaving the UCSF library one night. Ruth had been two years old at the time. Her uncle Edmund went on to become the leader of the family, a well-respected dentist, and an even more savvy real estate investor in low-income rental units.

When the grocer and then his wife died, in the 1960s, most of the inheritance-money, the house, the store, gold and jade, family photos- went to Edmund, with only a small cash gift given to LuLing in consideration of her brief marriage to Edwin. "Only give me this much" LuLing often described, pinching her fingers as if holding a flea. "Just because you not a boy."

With the death money, along with her years of savings, LuLing bought a two-unit building on Cabrillo and Forty-seventh, where she and Ruth lived in the top flat. GaoLing and Edmund moved to Saratoga, a town of vast-lawned ranch-style homes and kidney-shaped pools. Occasionally they would offer LuLing furniture they were going to replace with something better. "Why I should take?" she would fume. "So they can pity for me? Feel so good for themself, give me things they don't want? "

Throughout the years, LuLing lamented in Chinese, "Ai-ya, if only your father had lived, he would be even more successful than your uncle. And still we wouldn't spend so carelessly like them!" She also noted what should have been Ruth's rightful property: Grandmother Young's jade ring, money for a college fund. It shouldn't have mattered that Ruth was a girl or that Edwin had died. That was old Chinese thinking! LuLing said this so often Ruth could not help fantasizing what her life might have been like had her father lived. She could have bought patent-leather shoes, rhinestone-covered barrettes, and baby roses. Sometimes she stared at a photo of her father and felt angry he was dead. Then she felt guilty and scared. She tried to convince herself that she deeply loved this father she could not even remember. She picked the flowerlike weeds that grew in the cracks of sidewalks and put them in front of his framed picture.

Ruth now watched as LuLing searched in the closet for her purse. She was still pointing out GaoLing's transgressions. "Later grown-up time, want my things too. Want your daddy marry her. Yes, you don't know this. Edwin not Edmund, because he oldest, more success. Every day smile for him, show off her teeth, like monkey." LuLing turned around and demonstrated. "But he not interest in her, only me. She so mad. Later she marry Edmund, and when you daddy die, she say, Ooooh, so lucky I not marry Edwin! So stupid she saying that. To my face! Don't consider me, only concerning herself. I say nothing. I never complaining. Do I ever complaining?"

Ruth joined in the search, sticking her hands under seat cushions.

LuLing straightened herself to all four feet, eleven inches of indignity. "And now you see! Why GaoLing still want my money? She crazy, you know. She always think I got more, hiding somewhere. That's why I think she take my purse."

The dining room table, which LuLing never used, was a raft of junk mail. Ruth pushed aside the Chinese-language newspapers and magazines. Her mother had always been sanitary, but never neat. She hated grease but didn't mind chaos. She kept junk mail and coupons, as if they were personal greeting cards.

"Here it is!" Ruth cried. What a relief. She pulled out a green pocket-book from underneath a mound of magazines. As LuLing checked that her money and credit cards were still inside, Ruth noticed what had obscured the purse in the first place: new issues of Woodworking Today, Seventeen, Home Audio and Video, Runner's World, Cosmopolitan, Dog Fancy, Ski, Country Living-magazines her mother would never read in a million years.

"Why do you have all these?"

LuLing smiled shyly. "First I thinking, Get money, then tell you. Now you ask, so now I show you." She went to the kitchen drawer where she kept years of expired coupons and pulled out an oversized envelope.

"News from the gods, " LuLing murmured. "I won ten million dollar! Open and see."

Sure enough, inside were a sweepstakes promotion coupon that resembled a check, and a sheet of peel-off miniature magazine covers. Half the covers were missing. LuLing must have ordered three dozen magazines. Ruth could picture the mail carrier dragging over a sackful of them every day, spilling them onto the driveway, her mother's hopes and logic jumbled into the same pile.

"You surprise?" LuLing wore a look of absolute joy.

"You should tell the doctor your good news."

LuLing beamed, then added, "I win all for you."

Ruth felt a twinge in her chest. It quickly grew into an ache. She wanted to embrace her mother, shield her, and at the same time wanted her mother to cradle her, to assure her that she was okay, that she had not had a stroke or worse. That was how her mother had always been, difficult, oppressive, and odd. And in exactly that way, LuLing had loved her. Ruth knew that, felt it. No one could have loved her more. Better perhaps, but not more.

"Thanks, Ma. It's wonderful. We'll talk about it later, what to do with the money. But now we have to go. The doctor said we could still come at four, and we shouldn't be late."

LuLing turned crabby again. "You fault we late."

Ruth had to remind her to take her newly found purse, then her coat, finally her keys. She felt ten years old again, translating for her mother how the world worked, explaining the rules, the restrictions, the time limits on money-back guarantees. Back then she had been resentful. Now she was terrified.

THREE

In the hospital waiting room, Ruth saw that all the patients, except one pale balding man, were Asian. She read the blackboard listing of doctors' names: Fong, Wong, Wang, Tang, Chin, Pon, Kwak, Koo. The receptionist looked Chinese; so did the nurses.

In the sixties, mused Ruth, people railed against race-differentiated services as ghettoization. Now they demanded them as culturally sensitive. Then again, San Francisco was about a third Asian, so Chinese-targeted medicine could also be a marketing strategy. The balding man was glancing about, as if seeking an escape route. Did he have a last name like Young that had been mistakenly identified as Chinese by a race-blind computer? Did he also get calls from Chinese-speaking telemarketers trying to sign him up for long-distance calling plans for Hong Kong and Taiwan? Ruth knew what it meant to feel like an outsider, because she had often been one as a child. Moving to a new home eight times made her aware of how she didn't fit in.

"Fia start six grade?" LuLing was now asking.

"You're thinking of Dory," Ruth answered. Dory had been held back a year because of attention deficit disorder. She now received special tutoring.

"How can be Dory?"

"Fia's the older one, she's going into tenth. Dory's thirteen. She'll be in seventh."

"I know who who!" LuLing grumbled. She counted, flipping her fingers down as she listed: "Dory, Fia, oldest one Fu-Fu, seventeen." Ruth used to joke that Fu-Fu, her feral cat, born with a nasty disposition, was the grandchild LuLing never had. "How Fu-Fu do?" LuLing asked.

Hadn't she told her mother Fu-Fu had died? She must have. Or Art had. Everyone knew that Ruth had been depressed for weeks after it happened.

"Fu-Fu's dead," she reminded her mother.

"Ai-ya!" LuLing's face twisted with agony. "How this can be! What happen?"

"I told you-"

"No, you never!"

"Oh… Well, a few months ago, she went over the fence. A dog chased her. She couldn't climb back up fast enough."

"Why you have dog?"

"It was a neighbor's dog."

"Then why you let neighbor's dog come your backyard? Now see what happen! Ai-ya, die no reason!"

Her mother was speaking far too loudly. People were looking up from their knitting and reading, even the balding man. Ruth was pained. That cat had been her baby. She had held her the day she was born, a tiny wild ball of fur, found in Wendy's garage on a rainy day. Ruth had also held her as the vet gave the lethal shot to end her misery. Thinking about this nearly put Ruth over the edge, and she did not want to burst into tears in a waiting room full of strangers.

At that moment, luckily, the receptionist called out, "LuLing Young!" As Ruth helped her mother gather her purse and coat, she saw the balding man leap up and walk quickly toward an elderly Chinese woman. "Hey, Mom," Ruth heard him say. "How'd everything check out? Ready to go home?" The woman gruffly handed him a prescription note. He must be her son-in-law, Ruth surmised. Would Art ever take her mother to the doctor's? She doubted it. How about in the case of an emergency, a heart attack, a stroke?

The nurse spoke to LuLing in Cantonese and she answered in Mandarin. They settled on accented English as their common ground. LuLing quietly submitted to the preliminaries. Step on the scale. Eighty-five pounds. Blood pressure. One hundred over seventy. Roll up your sleeve and make a fist. LuLing did not flinch. She had taught Ruth to do the same, to look straight at the needle and not cry out. In the examination room, Ruth turned away as her mother slipped out of her cotton camisole and stood in her waist-high flowered panties.

LuLing put on a paper gown, climbed onto the examining table, and dangled her feet. She looked childlike and breakable. Ruth sank into a nearby chair. When the doctor arrived, they both sat up straight. LuLing had always had great respect for doctors.

"Mrs. Young!" the doctor greeted her jovially. "I'm Dr. Huey." He glanced at Ruth.

"I'm her daughter. I called your office earlier."

He nodded knowingly. Dr. Huey was a pleasant-looking man, younger than Ruth. He started asking LuLing questions in Cantonese, and her mother pretended to understand, until Ruth explained, "She speaks Mandarin, not Cantonese."

The doctor looked at her mother. "Guoyu?"

LuLing nodded, and Dr. Huey shrugged apologetically. "My Mandarin is pretty terrible. How's your English?"

"Good. No problem."

At the end of the examination, Dr. Huey smiled and announced, "Well, you are one very strong lady. Heart and lungs are great. Blood pressure excellent. Especially for someone your age. Let's see, what year were you born?" He scanned the chart, then looked up at LuLing. "Can you tell me?"

"Year?" LuLing's eyes darted upward as if the answer were on the ceiling. "This not so easy say."

"I want the truth, now," the doctor joked. "Not what you tell your friends."

"Truth is 1916," LuLing said.

Ruth interrupted. "What she means is-" and she was about to say 1921, but the doctor put up his hand to stop her from speaking. He glanced at the medical chart again, then said to LuLing, "So that makes you… how old?"

"Eighty-two this month!" she said.

Ruth bit her lip and looked at the doctor.

"Eighty-two." He wrote this down. "So tell me, were you born in China? Yes? What city?"

"Ah, this also not so easy say," LuLing began shyly. "Not really city, more like little place we call so many different name. Forty-six kilometer from bridge to Peking."

"Ah, Beijing," the doctor said. "I went there on a tour a couple of years ago. My wife and I saw the Forbidden City."

LuLing warmed up. "In those day, so many thing forbidden, can't see. Now everyone pay money see forbidden thing. You say this forbidden that forbidden, charge extra."

Ruth was about to burst. Her mother must sound garbled to Dr. Huey. She had had concerns about her, but she didn't want her concerns to be fully justified. Her worries were supposed to preclude any real problem. They always had.

"Did you go to school there as well?" Dr. Huey asked.

LuLing nodded. "Also my nursemaid teach me many things. Painting, reading, writing-"

"Very good. I was wondering if you could do a little math for me. I want you to count down from a hundred, subtracting seven each time."

LuLing went blank.

"Start at a hundred."

"Hundred!" LuLing said confidently, then nothing more.

Dr. Huey waited, and finally said, "Now count down by seven."

LuLing hesitated. "Ninety-two, ah, ninety-three. Ninety-three!"

This is not fair, Ruth wanted to shout. She has to convert the numbers into Chinese to do the calculations, then remember that, and put the answer back into English. Ruth's mind raced ahead. She wished she could lay out the answers for her mother telephatically. Eighty-six! Seventy-nine!

"Eighty… Eighty…" LuLing was stuck.

"Take your time, Mrs. Young."

"Eighty," she said at last. "After that, eighty-seven."

"Fine," Dr. Huey declared, with no change of expression. "Now I want you to name the last five presidents in reverse order."

Ruth wanted to protest: Even I can't do that!

LuLing's eyebrows bunched in thought. " Clinton," she said after a pause. "Last five year still Clinton." Her mother had not even understood the question! Of course she hadn't. She had always depended on Ruth to tell her what people meant, to give her what they said from another angle. "Reverse order" means "go backward," she would have told LuLing. If Dr. Huey could ask that same question in fluent Mandarin, it would be no problem for LuLing to give the right answer. "This president, that president," her mother would have said without hesitation, "no difference, all liar. No tax before election, more tax after. No crime before, more crime after. And always don't cut welfare. I come this country, I don't get welfare. What so fair? No fair. Only make people lazy to work!"

More ridiculous questions followed.

"Do you know today's date?"

"Monday." Date and day always sound the same to her.

"What was the date five months ago?"

"Still Monday." When you stop to think about it, she's right.

"How many grandchildren do you have?"

"Don't now. She not married yet." He doesn't see that she's joking!

LuLing was like the losing contestant on Jeopardy! Total for LuLing Young: minus five hundred points. And now for our final Jeopardy/ round…

"How old is your daughter?"

LuLing hesitated. "Forty, maybe forty-one." To her mother, she was always younger than she really was.

"What year was she born?"

"Same as me. Dragon year." She looked at Ruth for confirmation. Her mother was a Rooster.

"What month?" Dr. Huey asked.

"What month?" LuLing asked Ruth. Ruth shrugged helplessly. "She don't know."

"What year is it now?"

"Nineteen ninety-eight!" She looked at the doctor as if he were an idiot not to know that. Ruth was relieved that her mother had answered one question right.

"Mrs. Young, could you wait here while your daughter and I go outside to schedule another appointment? "

"Sure-sure. I not go anywhere."

As Dr. Huey turned for the door, he stopped. "And thank you for answering all the questions. I'm sure you must have felt like you were on the witness stand."

"Like O.J."

Dr. Huey laughed. "I guess everyone watched that trial on TV."

LuLing shook her head. "Oh no, not just watch TV, I there when it happen. He kill wife and that friend, bring her glasses. Everything I see."

Ruth's heart started to thump. "You saw a documentary," she said for Dr. Huey's benefit, "a reenactment of what might have happened, and it was like watching the real thing. Is that what you're saying?"

LuLing waved to dismiss this simple answer. "Maybe you see document. / see real thing." She demonstrated with motions. "He grab her like this, cut neck here-very deep, so much blood. Awful."

"So you were in Los Angeles that day?" Dr. Huey asked.

LuLing nodded.

Ruth was flailing for logic. "I don't remember you ever going to L.A. "

"How I go, don't know. But I there. This true! I follow that man, oh he sneaky. O.J. hide in bush. Later, I go his house too. Watch him take glove, stick in garden, go back inside change clothes-" LuLing caught herself, embarrassed. "Well, he change clothes, course I don't look, turn my eyes. Later he run to airport, almost late, jump on plane. I see whole thing."

"You saw this and didn't tell anyone?"

"I scared!"

"The murder must have been an awful thing for you to see," Dr. Huey said.

LuLing nodded bravely.

"Thank you for sharing that. Now, if you'll just wait here a few minutes, your daughter and I are going to step into another room and schedule your next appointment."

"No hurry."

Ruth followed the doctor into another room. "How long have you noticed this kind of confusion?" Dr. Huey asked right away.

Ruth sighed. "It's been a little worse in the last six months, maybe longer than that. But today she seems worse than usual. Except for the last thing she said, she hasn't been that weird or forgetful. It's more like mix-ups, and most of it is due to her not speaking English that well, as you may have noticed. The story about O. J. Simpson-you know, that may be another language problem. She's never been good at expressing herself-"

"It sounded pretty clear to me that she thought she was there," Dr. Huey said gently.

Ruth looked away.

"You mentioned to the nurse that she had a car accident. Was there a head injury? "

"She did bump her head on the steering wheel." Ruth was suddenly hopeful that this was the missing piece to the puzzle.

"Does her personality seem to be changing? Is she depressed, more argumentative?"

Ruth tried to guess what an affirmative response might indicate. "My mother's always gotten into arguments, all her life. She has a terrible temper. And as long as I've known her, she's been depressed. Her husband, my father, was killed forty-four years ago. Hit-and-run. She never got over it. Maybe the depression is becoming worse, but I'm so used to it I'd be the last one to notice. As for her confusion, I was wondering if it was a concussion from the car accident or if she might have had a mini-stroke." Ruth tried to remember the correct medical term. "You know, a TIA."

"So far I don't see any evidence of that. Her motor movements are good, reflexes are fine. Blood pressure is excellent. But we'll want to run a few more tests, also make sure she's not diabetic or anemic, for instance."

"Those could cause problems like this?"

"They could, as could Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia."

Ruth felt her stomach had been punched. Her mother wasn't that bad off. He was talking about a horrible terminal illness. Thank God she had not told the doctor about the other things she had tabulated: the argument her mother had had with Francine over the rent; the ten-million-dollar check from the magazine sweepstakes; her forgetting that Fu-Fu had died. "So it could be depression," Ruth said.

"We haven't ruled out anything yet."

"Well, if it is, you'll have to tell her the antidepressants are ginseng or po chat pills."

Dr. Huey laughed. "Resistance to Western medication is common among our elderly patients here. And as soon as they feel better, they stop taking it to save money." He handed her a form. "Give this to Lorraine at the computer station around the corner. Let's schedule your mother to see the folks in Psychiatry and Neurology, then have her come back to see me again in a month."

"Around the Full Moon Festival."

Dr. Huey looked up. "Is that when it is? I can never keep track."

"I only know because I'm hosting this year's family reunion dinner."

That evening, as Ruth steamed the sea bass, she told Art in an offhanded way, "I took my mom to see the doctor. She may have depression."

And Art said, "So what else is new?"

At dinner, LuLing sat next to Ruth. "Too salty," she remarked in Chinese, poking at her portion of fish. And then she added: "Tell those girls to finish their fish. Don't let them waste food."

"Fia, Dory, why aren't you eating?" Ruth said.

"I'm full," Dory answered. "We stopped at Burger King in the Presidio and ate a bunch of fries before we came home."

"You shouldn't let them eat those things!" LuLing scolded, continuing in Mandarin. "Tell them you don't allow this anymore."

"Girls, I wish you wouldn't ruin your appetites with junk food."

"And I wish you two would stop talking like spies in Chinese," Fia said. "It's like really rude."

LuLing glared at Ruth, and Ruth glanced at Art, but he was looking down at his plate. "Waipo speaks Chinese," Ruth said, "because that's the language she's used to." Ruth had told them to call LuLing "Waipo," the Chinese honorific for "Grandmother," and at least they did that, but then again, they thought it was just a nickname.

"She can speak English too," Dory said.

"Tst!" LuLing grumbled to Ruth. "Why doesn't their father scold them? He should tell them to listen to you. Why doesn't he have more concern for you? No wonder he never married you. No respect for you. Say something to him. Why don't you tell him to be nicer to you?…"

Ruth wished she could go back to being mute. She wanted to shout for her mother to stop complaining about things she could not change. Yet she also wanted to defend her to the girls, especially now that something was wrong with her. LuLing acted eternally strong, but she was also fragile. Why couldn't Fia and Dory understand that and act a little kinder?

Ruth remembered how she felt when she was their age. She too had resented LuLing's speaking Chinese in front of others, knowing they couldn't understand her covert remarks. "Look how fat that lady is," LuLing might say. Or, "Luyi, go ask that man to give us a better price." If Ruth obeyed, she was mortified. And if she didn't, as she now recalled, even more dire consequences followed.

By using Chinese words, LuLing could put all kinds of wisdom in Ruth's mind. She could warn her away from danger, disease, and death.

"Don't play with her, too many germs," LuLing told six-year-old Ruth one day, nodding toward the girl from across the street. The girl's name was Teresa, and she had two front teeth missing, a scab on one knee, and a dress smeared with handprints. "I saw her pick up old candy off the sidewalk and eat it. And look at her nose, sickness pouring out all over the place."

Ruth liked Teresa. She laughed a lot and always kept in her pockets things she had found: balls of foil, broken marbles, flower heads. Ruth had just started at another new school, and Teresa was the only girl who played with her. Neither of them was very popular.

"Did you hear me?" LuLing said.

"Yes," Ruth answered.

The next day, Ruth was playing in the schoolyard. Her mother was on the other side of the yard, monitoring other kids. Ruth climbed up the slide, eager to tumble down the silver curl into cool, dark sand. She had done this with Teresa a dozen times without her mother's seeing.

But then a familiar voice, loud and shrill, rang across the playground: "No! Luyi, stop! What are you doing? You want to break your body in half?"

Ruth stood at the top of the slide, frozen with shame. Her mother was the busybody watcher of kindergartners, whereas Ruth was in the first grade! Some of the other first-graders were laughing down below. "Is that your mother?" they shouted. "What's that gobbledy-gook-gook she's saying?"

"She's not my mother!" Ruth shouted back. "I don't know who she is!" Her mother's eyes locked on hers. Although she was clear across the playground, she heard everything, saw everything. She had magic eyes on the back of her head.

You can't stop me, Ruth thought fiercely. She threw herself down the slide, head first, arms straight out-the position that only the bravest and wildest boys would take-fast, fast, fast into the sand. And then she crashed face first, with such force that she bit her lip, bumped her nose, bent her glasses, and broke her arm. She lay still. The world was burning, shot full of red lightning.

"Ruthie's dead!" a boy yelled. Girls began screaming.

I'm not dead, Ruth tried to cry out, but it was like speaking in a dream. Nothing came from her lips the way she wanted. Or was she truly dead? Was that how it felt, this oozing from her nose, the pain in her head and arm, the way she moved, as slowly and heavily as an elephant in water? Soon she felt familiar hands brushing over her head and neck. Her mother was lifting her, murmuring tenderly, "Ai-ya, how could you be so foolish? Look at you."

Blood ran from Ruth's nose and dripped onto the front of her white blouse, staining the broad lace-trimmed collar. She lay limply in her mother's lap, looking up at Teresa and the faces of the other children. She saw their fright, but also their awe. If she could have moved, she would have smiled. At last they were paying attention to her, the new girl at school. She then saw her mother's face, the tears streaming down her cheeks, falling on her own face like wet kisses. Her mother wasn't angry, she was worried, full of love. And in her amazement, Ruth forgot her pain.

Later she lay on a cot in the nurse's office. Her nosebleed was stanched with gauze, her punctured lip was cleansed. A cold washcloth covered her forehead, and her arm was elevated on a bag of ice.

"She may have fractured her arm," the nurse told LuLing. "And her nerves might be torn. There's a great deal of swelling, but she's not complaining of too much pain."

"She good, never complain."

"You need to take her to the doctor. Do you understand? Go see a doctor."

"Okay, okay, go see doctor."

As LuLing led her out, a teacher said, "Look how brave she is! She's not even crying." Two popular girls gave Ruth big smiles of admiration. They waved. Teresa was also there, and Ruth gave her a quick, secret smile.

In the car on the way to the doctor's office, Ruth noticed that her mother was strangely quiet. She kept looking at Ruth, who expected harsh words to start any moment: I told you that big slide was dangerous. Why didn't you listen to me? You could have cracked open your brain like a watermelon! Now I have to work overtime to pay for this. Ruth waited, but her mother only asked every now and then if she was hurting. Each time Ruth shook her head.

As the doctor examined Ruth's arm, LuLing sucked air between her teeth in agony and moaned: "Ai-ya! Careful, careful, careful. She hurt real bad." When the cast was put on, LuLing said proudly, "Teacher, children, all very impress. Lootie no cry, no complain, nothing, just quiet."

By the time they arrived home, the excitement had worn off, and Ruth felt a throbbing pain in her arm and head. She tried not to cry. LuLing put her in her vinyl La-Z-Boy and made her as comfortable as possible. "You want me to cook you rice porridge? Eat. That will help you get well. How about spicy turnips? You want some now, while I cook dinner? "

The less Ruth said, the more her mother tried to guess what she might want. As she lay in the recliner, she heard LuLing talking to Auntie Gal on the phone.

"She was almost killed! Scared me to death. Really! I'm not exaggerating. She was nearly yanked from this life and on her way to the yellow springs… I just about cracked my own teeth to see how much pain she was in… No, no tears, she must have inherited the strength of her grandmother. Well, she's eating a little bit now. She can't talk, and I thought at first she bit off her tongue, but I think it's only the fright. Come over to visit? Fine, fine, but tell your kids to be careful. I don't want her arm to fall off."

They came bearing gifts. Auntie Gal brought a bottle of eau de toilette. Uncle Edmund gave Ruth a new toothbrush and matching plastic cup. Her cousins handed her coloring books, crayons, and a stuffed dog. LuLing had pushed the television set close to the La-Z-Boy, since Ruth had a hard time seeing without her glasses.

"Does it hurt?" her younger cousin, Sally, asked.

Ruth shrugged, though her arm was now aching.

"Man oh man, I wish I had a cast," Billy said. He was the same age as Ruth. "Daddy, can I have one too?"

"Don't say such bad-luck things!" Auntie Gal warned.

When Billy tried to change the television channel, Uncle Edmund sternly ordered him to put it back to the program Ruth had been watch ing. She had never heard her uncle be strict with her cousins. Billy was a spoiled brat.

"Why aren't you talking?" Sally asked. "Did you break your mouth too?"

"Yeah," Billy said. "Did the fall make you stupid or something?"

"Billy, stop teasing," Auntie Gal said. "She's resting. She has too much pain to talk."

Ruth wondered whether this was true. She thought about making a little sound so small no one would even hear. But if she did, then all the good things that were happening might disappear. They would decide she was fine, and everything would go back to normal. Her mother would start scolding her for being careless and disobedient.

For two days after the fall, Ruth was helpless; her mother had to feed, dress, and bathe her. LuLing would tell her what to do: "Open your mouth. Eat a little more. Put your arm in here. Try to keep your head still while I brush your hair." It was comforting to be a baby again, well loved, blameless.

When she returned to school, Ruth found a big streamer of butcher paper hanging at the front of the classroom. "Welcome Back, Ruth!" it said. Miss Sondegard, the teacher, announced that every single boy and girl had helped make it. She led the classroom in clapping for Ruth's bravery. Ruth smiled shyly. Her heart was about to burst. She had never been as proud and happy. She wished she had broken her arm a long time before.

During lunch, girls vied with one another to present her with imaginary trinkets and serve as her maiden-in-waiting. She was invited to step into the "secret castle," a rock-bordered area near a tree at the edge of the sandbox. Only the most popular girls could be princesses. The princesses now took turns drawing on Ruth's cast. One of them gingerly asked, "Is it still broken?" Ruth nodded, and another girl whispered loudly: "Let's bring her magic potions." The princesses scampered off in search of bottle caps, broken glass, and fairy-sized clover.

At the end of the day, Ruth's mother went to her classroom to pick her up. Miss Sondegard took LuLing aside, and Ruth had to act as though she were not listening.

"I think she's a bit tired, which is natural for the first day back. But I'm a little concerned that she's so quiet. She didn't say a word all day, not even ouch."

"She never complain," LuLing agreed.

"It may not be a problem, but we'll need to watch if this continues."

"No problem," LuLing assured her. "She no problem."

"You must encourage her to talk, Mrs. Young. I don't want this to turn into a problem."

"No problem!" her mother reiterated.

"Make her say 'hamburger' before letting her eat a hamburger. Make her say 'cookie' before she gets a cookie."

That night LuLing took the teacher's advice literally: she served hamburger, which she had never done. LuLing did not cook or eat beef of any kind. It disgusted her, reminded her of scarred flesh. Yet now, for her daughter's sake, she put an unadorned patty in front of Ruth, who was thrilled to see her mother had actually made American food for once.

"Hambugga? You say 'hambugga,' then eat."

Ruth was tempted to speak, but she was afraid to break the spell. One word and all the good things in her life would vanish. She shook her head. LuLing encouraged her until the hamburger's rivulets of fat had congealed into ugly white pools. She put the patty in the fridge, then served Ruth a bowl of steaming rice porridge, which she said was better for her health anyway.

After dinner, LuLing cleared the dining table and started to work. She laid out ink, brushes, and a roll of paper. With quick and perfect strokes, she wrote large Chinese characters: "Going Out of Business. Last few days! No offer refused!" She set the banner aside to dry, then cut a new length of paper.

Ruth, who was watching television, noticed after a while that her mother was staring at her. "Why you not do study?" LuLing asked. She had made Ruth practice reading and writing since kindergarten, to help her be "one jump ahead."

Ruth held up her broken right arm in its cast.

"Come sit here," her mother said in Chinese.

Ruth slowly stood up. Uh-oh. Her mother was back to her old ways.

"Now hold this." LuLing placed a brush in Ruth's left hand. "Write your name." Her first attempts were clumsy, the R almost unrecognizable, the hump of the h veering off the paper like an out-of-control bicycle. She giggled.

"Hold the brush straight up," her mother instructed, "not at a slant. Use a light touch, like this."

The next results were better, but they had taken up a whole length of paper.

"Now try to write smaller." But the letters looked like blotches made by an ink-soaked fly twirling on its back. When it was finally time for bed, the practice session had consumed nearly twenty sheets of paper, both front and back. This was a sign of success as well as extravagance. LuLing never wasted anything. She gathered the used sheets, stacked them, and set them in a corner of the room. Ruth knew she would use them later, as practice sheets for her own calligraphy, as blotters for spills, as bundled-up hot pads for pans.

The following evening, after dinner, LuLing presented Ruth with a large tea tray filled with smooth wet sand gathered from the playground at school. "Here," she said, "you practice, use this." She held a chopstick in her left hand, then scratched the word "study" on the miniature beach. When she finished, she swept the sand clean and smooth with the long end of the chopstick. Ruth followed suit and found that it was easier to write this way, also fun. The sand-and-chopstick method did not require the delicate, light-handed technique of the brush. She could apply a force that steadied her. She wrote her name. Neat! It was like playing with the Etch-A-Sketch that her cousin Billy received last Christmas.

LuLing went to the refrigerator and brought out the cold beef patty. "Tomorrow what you want eat?"

And Ruth scratched back: B-U-R-G-R.

LuLing laughed. "Hah! So now you can talk back this way!"

The next day, LuLing brought the tea tray to school and filled it with sand from the same part of the schoolyard where Ruth had broken her arm. Miss Sondegard agreed to let Ruth answer questions this way. And when Ruth raised her hand during an arithmetic drill and scrawled "7," all the other kids jumped out of their chairs to look. Soon they were clamoring that they too wanted to do sand-writing. At recess, Ruth was very popular. She heard them fussing over her. "Let me try!" "Me, me! She said I could!" "You gotta use your left hand, or it's cheating!" "Ruth, you show Tommy how to do it. He's so dumb."

They returned the chopstick to Ruth. And Ruth wrote quickly and easily the answers to their questions: Does your arm hurt? A little. Can I touch your cast? Yes. Does Ricky love Betsy? Yes. Will I get a new bike for my birthday? Yes.

They treated her as though she were Helen Keller, a genius who didn't let injury keep her from showing how smart she was. Like Helen Keller, she simply had to work harder, and perhaps this was what made her smarter, the effort and others' admiring that. Even at home, her mother would ask her, "What you think?" as if Ruth would know, just because she had to write the answers to her questions in sand.

"How does the bean curd dish taste?" LuLing asked one night.

And Ruth etched: Salty, She had never said anything bad about her mother's cooking before, but that was what her mother always said to criticize her own food.

"I thought so too," her mother answered.

This was amazing! Soon her mother was asking her opinion on all kinds of matters.

"We go shop dinner now or go later?" Later.

"What about stock market? I invest, you think I get lucky?" Lucky.

"You like this dress?" No, ugly. Ruth had never experienced such power with words.

Her mother frowned, then murmured in Mandarin. "Your father loved this old dress, and now I can never throw it away." She became misty-eyed. She sighed, then said in English: "You think you daddy miss me?"

Ruth wrote Yes right away. Her mother beamed. And then Ruth had an idea. She had always wanted a little dog. Now was the time to ask for one. She scratched in the sand: Doggie.

Her mother gasped. She stared at the words and shook her head in disbelief. Oh well, Ruth thought, that was one wish she was not going to get. But then her mother began to whimper, "Doggie, doggie," in Chinese. She jumped up and her chest heaved. "Precious Auntie," LuLing cried, "you've come back. This is your Doggie. Do you forgive me?"

Ruth put down the chopstick.

LuLing was now sobbing. "Precious Auntie, oh Precious Auntie! I wish you never died! It was all my fault. If I could change fate, I would rather kill myself than suffer without you…"

Oh, no. Ruth knew what this was. Her mother sometimes talked about this Precious Auntie ghost who lived in the air, a lady who had not behaved and who wound up living at the End of the World. That was where all bad people went: a bottomless pit where no one would ever find them, and there they would be stuck, wandering with their hair hanging to their toes, wet and bloody.

"Please let me know you are not mad at me," her mother went on. "Give me a sign. I have tried to tell you how sorry I am, but I don't know if you've heard. Can you hear me? When did you come to America?"

Ruth sat still, unable to move. She wanted to go back to talking about food and clothes.

Her mother put the chopstick in Ruth's hand. "Here, do this. Close your eyes, turn your face to heaven, and speak to her. Wait for her answer, then write it down. Hurry, close your eyes."

Ruth squeezed her eyes shut. She saw the lady with hair to her toes.

She heard her mother speak again in polite Chinese: "Precious Auntie, I did not mean what I said before you died. And after you died, I tried to find your body."

Ruth's eyes flew open. In her imagination, the long-haired ghost was walking in circles.

"I went down into the ravine. I looked and looked. Oh, I was crazy with grief. If only I had found you, I would have taken your bones to the cave and given you a proper burial."

Ruth felt something touch her shoulder, and she jumped. "Ask her if she understood everything I just said," LuLing ordered. "Ask her if my luck has changed. Is the curse over? Are we safe? Write down her answer."

What curse? Ruth now stared at the sand, half believing the dead woman's face would appear in a pool of blood. What answer did her mother want? Did Yes mean the curse was gone? Or that it was still there? She put the chopstick in the sand, and not knowing what to write, she drew a line and another below that. She drew two more lines and made a square.

"Mouth!" her mother cried, tracing over the square. "That's the character for 'mouth'!" She stared at Ruth. "You wrote that and you don't even know how to write Chinese! Did you feel Precious Auntie guiding your hand? What did it feel like? Tell me."

Ruth shook her head. What was happening? She wanted to cry but didn't dare. She wasn't supposed to be able to make a sound.

"Precious Auntie, thank you for helping my daughter. Forgive me that she speaks only English. It must be hard for you to communicate through her this way. But now I know that you can hear me. And you know what I'm saying, that I wish I could take your bones to the Mouth of the Mountain, to the Monkey's Jaw. I've never forgotten. As soon as I can go to China, I will finish my duty. Thank you for reminding me."

Ruth wondered what she had written. How could a square mean all that? Was there really a ghost in the room? What was in her hand and the chopstick? Why was her hand shaking?

"Since I may not be able to go back to China for a long time," LuLing continued, "I hope you will still forgive me. Please know that my life has been miserable ever since you left me. That is why I ask you to take my life, but to spare my daughter if the curse cannot be changed. I know her recent accident was a warning."

Ruth dropped the chopstick. The lady with bloody hair was trying to kill her! So it was true, that day at the playground, she almost died. She had thought so, and it was true.

LuLing retrieved the chopstick and tried to put it in Ruth's hand. But Ruth balled her fist. She pushed the sand tray away. Her mother pushed it back and kept babbling nonsense: "I'm so happy you've finally found me. I've been waiting for so many years. Now we can talk to each other. Every day you can guide me. Every day you can tell me how to conduct my life in the way I should."

LuLing turned to Ruth. "Ask her to come every day." Ruth shook her head. She tried to slide off her chair. "Ask," LuLing insisted, and tapped the table in front of the tray. And then Ruth finally found her voice.

"No," she said out loud. "I can't."

"Wah! Now you can talk again." Her mother had switched to English. "Precious Auntie cure you?"

Ruth nodded. "That mean curse gone?"

"Yes, but she says she has to go back now. And she said I need to rest." "She forgive me? She-"

"She said everything will be all right. Everything. All right? You're not supposed to worry anymore." Her mother sobbed with relief.

As Ruth drove her mother home after dinner, she marveled at the worries she had had at such an early age. But that was nothing compared with what most children had to go through these days. An unhappy mother? That was a piece of cake next to guns and gangs and sexually transmitted diseases, not to mention the things parents had to be concerned about: pedophiles on the Web, designer drugs like ecstasy, school shootings, anorexia, bulimia, self-mutilation, the ozone layer, superbacteria. Ruth counted these automatically on her hand, and this reminded her she had one more task to do before the end of the day: call Miriam about letting the girls come to the reunion dinner.

She glanced at her watch. It was almost nine, an iffy time to telephone people who were not close friends. True, she and Miriam were bound by the closest of reasons, the girls and their father. But they treated each other with the politeness of strangers. She often ran into Miriam at dropoff and pick-up points for the girls, at school athletic events, and once she'd seen her in the emergency room, where Ruth had taken Dory when she broke her ankle. She and Miriam made small talk about recent illnesses, bad weather, and traffic jams. If it weren't for the circumstances, they might have enjoyed each other's company. Miriam was clever, funny, and opinionated, and Ruth liked these qualities. But it bothered Ruth when Miriam made passing remarks about intimacies she had shared with Art when they were married: the funny time they had on a trip to Italy, a mole on his back that had to be checked for melanoma, his love of massage. For Art's birthday the year before, Miriam had given him a certificate for two sessions with her favorite massage therapist, a gift Ruth thought inappropriately personal. "Do you still get that mole checked every year?" Miriam asked Art on another occasion, and Ruth pretended not to hear, all the while imagining what they had been like together when they were younger and in love, and she still cared deeply enough to notice the slightest change in the size of a mole. She pictured them lazing about in a Tuscan villa with a bedroom window that overlooked rolling hills of orchards, giggling and naming moles on each other's naked backs as if they were constellations. She could see it: the two of them massaging olive oil into their thighs with long-reaching strokes. Art once tried that on her, and Ruth figured he must have learned the maneuver from someone. Whenever he tried to massage her thighs, though, it made her tense. With massage, she just couldn't relax. She felt she was being tickled, pushed out of control, then felt claustrophobic, panicky enough to want to leap up and run.

She never told Art about the panic; she said only that with her, massage was a waste of time and money. And although she was curious about Art's sex life with Miriam and other women, she never asked what he had done in bed with his former lovers. And he did not ask about hers. It shocked her that Wendy badgered Joe to give her explicit details about his past escapades in beds and on beaches, as well as tell her his precise feelings when he first slept with her. "And he tells you whatever you ask?" Ruth said.

"He states his name, birthdate, and Social Security number. And then I beat him up until he tells me."

"Then you're happy?"

"I'm pissed!"

"So why do you ask?"

"It's like part of me thinks everything about him is mine, his feelings, his fantasies. I know that's not right, but emotionally that's how I feel. His past is my past, it belongs to me. Shit, if I could find his childhood toy box I'd want to look inside that and say, 'Mine.' I'd want to see what girlie magazines he hid under the mattress and pulled out to masturbate to."

Ruth laughed out loud when Wendy said that, but inside she was uncomfortable. Did most women ask men those kinds of questions? Had Miriam asked Art things like these? Did more of Art's past belong to Miriam than it did to her?

Her mother's voice startled her. "So how Fu-Fu do?"

Not again. Ruth took a deep breath. "Fu-Fu's fine," she said this time.

"Really?" LuLing said. "That cat old. You lucky she not dead yet."

Ruth was so surprised she snorted in laughter. This was like the torment of being tickled. She couldn't stand it, but she could not stop her reflex to laugh out loud. Tears stung her eyes and she was glad for the darkness of the car.

"Why you laugh?" LuLing scolded. "I not kidding. And don't let dog in backyard. I know someone do this. Now cat dead!"

"You're right," Ruth answered, trying to keep her mind on the road ahead. "I'll be more careful."

FOUR

On the night of the Full Moon Festival, the Fountain Court restaurant was jammed with a line flowing out the door like a dragon's tail. Art and Ruth squeezed through the crowd. "Excuse us. We have reservations."

Inside, the dining room roared with the conversations of a hundred happy people. Children used chopsticks to play percussion on teacups and water glasses. The waiter who led Ruth and Art to their tables had to shout above the clatter of plates being delivered and taken away. As Ruth followed, she inhaled the mingled fragrances of dozens of entrees. At least the food would be good tonight.

Ruth had picked Fountain Court because it was one of the few restaurants where her mother had not questioned the preparation of the dishes, the attitude of the waiters, or the cleanliness of the bowls. Originally Ruth had made reservations for two tables, seating for her side of the family and friends, as well as the two girls and Art's parents, who were visiting from New Jersey. Those she had not counted on were Art's ex-wife Miriam, her husband Stephen, and their two little boys, Andy and Beauregard. Miriam had called Art the week before with a request.

When Ruth learned what the request was, she balked.

"There isn't room for four more people."

"You know Miriam," Art said. "She doesn't accept no as an answer to anything. Besides, it's the only chance my folks will have to see her before they leave for Carmel."

"So where are they going to sit? At another table?"

"We can always squeeze in more chairs," Art countered. "It's just a dinner."

To Ruth, this particular gathering was not "just a dinner." It was their Chinese thanksgiving, the reunion that she was hosting for the first time. She had given much thought to setting it up, what it should mean, what family meant, not just blood relatives but also those who were united by the past and would remain together over the years, people she was grateful to have in her life. She wanted to thank all the celebrants for their contribution to her feeling of family. Miriam would be a reminder that the past was not always good and the future was uncertain. But to say all this would sound petty to Art, and Fia and Dory would think she was being mean.

Without more disagreement, Ruth made the last-minute changes: Called the restaurant to change the head count. Revised the seating plan. Ordered more dishes for two adults and two children who didn't like Chinese food all that much. She suspected that Fia's and Dory's fussiness over unfamiliar food came from their mother.

Art's parents were the first to arrive at the restaurant. "Arlene, Marty," Ruth greeted them. They exchanged polite two-cheek kisses. Arlene hugged her son, and Marty gave a light two-punch to his shoulder and then his jaw. "You knock me out," Art said, supplying their traditional father-son refrain.

The Kamens were impeccable in their classy outfits and stood out amid the crowd of casually attired customers. Ruth wore an Indonesian batik-print top and crinkled skirt. It occurred to her that Miriam dressed like the Kamens, in designer-style clothing that had to be professionally pressed and dry-cleaned. Miriam loved Art's parents, and they adored her, whereas, Ruth felt, the Kamens had never warmed to her. Even though she had met Art after the divorce was nearly final, Marty and Arlene probably saw her as the interloper, the reason Miriam and Art did not reconcile. Ruth had sensed that the Kamens hoped she was only a brief interlude in Art's life. They never knew how to introduce her. "This is Art's, uh, Ruth," they'd say. They were nice to her, certainly. They had given her lovely birthday presents, a silk velvet scarf, Chanel No. 5, a lacquered tea tray, but nothing she might share with Art or pass on to his girls-or any future children, for that matter, since she was beyond the possibility of giving the Kamens additional grandchildren. Miriam, on the other hand, was now and forever the mother of the Kamens' granddaughters, the keeper of heirlooms for Fia and Dory. Marty and Arlene already had given her the family sterling, china, and the mezuzah kissed by five generations of Kamens since the days they lived in the Ukraine.

"Miriam! Stephen!" Ruth exclaimed with enthusiastic effort. She shook hands, and Miriam gave her a quick hug and waved to Art across the table. "Glad you could join us," Ruth said awkwardly, then turned to the boys. "Andy, Beauregard, how you doing?"

The younger one, who was four, piped up: "I'm called Boomer now."

"It's awfully nice of you to include us," Miriam gushed to Ruth. "I hope it wasn't any trouble."

"Not at all."

Miriam opened wide her arms toward Marty and Arlene, and rushed to give them effusive hugs. She was wearing a maroon-and-olive outfit with a huge circular pleated collar. Her copper-colored hair was cut in a severe page boy. Ruth was reminded why the hairstyle was called that. Miriam looked like one of those pages in Renaissance paintings.

Ruth's cousin Billy-now called Bill by others-showed up, trailed by his second wife, Dawn, and their combined four children, ages nine through seventeen. Ruth and Billy rocked in embrace. He thumped her back, as guys did with their buddies. He had been a skinny brat and a bully to Ruth in childhood, but those qualities had turned out to be leadership skills. Today he ran a biotech company and had grown chubby with success. "God, it's good to see you," he said. Ruth immediately felt better about the dinner.

Sally, always the social one, made a loud entrance, shouting names and squealing as her husband and two boys followed. She was an aeronautical engineer, who traveled widely as an expert witness for law firms, plaintiff attorneys only. She inspected records and sites of airplane disasters, mostly small craft. Always a talker, she was perky and outgoing, not intimidated by anyone or any new adventure. Her husband, George, was a violinist with the San Francisco Symphony, quiet but happy to take the lead whenever Sally fed him a line. "George, tell them about the dog that ran onstage at Stern Grove and peed on the microphone and shorted out the entire sound system." Then George would repeat exactly what Sally had just said.

Ruth looked up and saw Wendy and Joe, gazing about the crowd. Behind them was Gideon, nattily dressed and perfectly groomed as usual, holding an expensive bouquet of tropical flowers. When Wendy turned and saw him, she smiled in mock delight, and he pretended to be just as enthusiastic. She had once called him "a star-fucker who practically gives himself neck strain looking past your shoulder for more important people to talk to." Gideon, in turn, had said that Wendy was "a vulgarian, who lacks the nuance to know why it's not good manners to grace everybody with lurid details of one's menstrual problems at the dinner table." Ruth had thought about inviting one and not the other, but in a stupid moment of resolve, she decided they would just have to work it out between them, even if it gave her heartburn to watch.

Wendy waved both hands when she spotted Ruth, and then she and Joe eased their way through the restaurant. Gideon trailed a comfortable distance behind. "We found a parking space right in front!" Wendy boasted. She held up her lucky charm, a plastic angel with the face of a parking meter. "I tell you, works every time!" She had given one to Ruth, who had placed it on the dashboard but only received parking tickets. "Hi, sweetie," Gideon said in his usual low-key manner. "You're looking radiant. Or is that sweat and nervousness?" Ruth, who had told him on the phone about Miriam's crashing the party, kissed him on both cheeks and whispered where Art's ex was. He had already suggested he act as spy and report everything appalling that she said.

Art came up to Ruth. "How's it going?"

"Where are Fia and Dory?"

"They went to check out a CD at Green Apple Annex."

"You let them go by themselves?"

"It's just up the street, and they said they'd be back in ten minutes."

"So where are they?"

"Probably abducted."

"That's not funny." Her mother used to say it was bad luck even to speak words like that. On cue. LuLing entered, her petite frame contrasting with GaoLing's sturdier one. A few seconds later, Uncle Edmund came in. Ruth sometimes wondered whether this was how her father would have looked-tall, stoop-shouldered, with a crown of thick white hair and a large, relaxed swing to his arms and legs. Uncle Edmund was given to telling jokes badly, consoling scared children, and dispensing stock market tips. LuLing often said the two brothers weren't similar at all, that Ruth's father had been much more handsome, smarter, and very honest. His only fault was that he was too trusting, also maybe absent-minded when he was concentrating too hard, just like Ruth. LuLing often recounted the circumstances in which he died as a warning to Ruth when she was not paying attention to her mother. "You daddy see green light, he trust that car stop. Poom! Run over, drag him one block, two block, never stop." She said he died because of a curse, the same one that made Ruth break her arm. And because the subject of the curse often came up when LuLing was displeased with Ruth, as a child Ruth thought the curse and her father's death were related to her. She had recurrent nightmares of mutilating people in a brakeless car. She always tested and retested her brakes before heading out in the car.

Even from across the big room, Ruth could see that LuLing was beaming at her with motherly adoration. This gave Ruth heart pangs, made her both happy and sad to see her mother on this special day. Why wasn't their relationship always like this? How many more gatherings like this would they have?

"Happy Full Moon," Ruth said when her mother reached the table. She motioned for LuLing to sit next to her. Auntie Gal took the other chair next to Ruth, and then the rest of the family sat down. Ruth saw that Art was with Miriam at the other table, what was fast becoming the non-Chinese section.

"Hey, are we in the white ghetto or what?" Wendy called out. She was sitting with her back to Ruth.

When Fia and Dory finally showed up, Ruth did not feel she could chastise them in front of their mother or Arlene and Marty. They did a mass wave, "Hi, everybody," then gurgled, "Hi, Bubbie and Poppy," and threw their arms around their grandparents' necks. The girls never voluntarily hugged LuLing.

The dinner began with a flurry of appetizers set on the lazy Susan, what LuLing called the "go-round." The adults oohed and aahed, the children cried, "I'm starved!" The waiters set down what Ruth had ordered by phone: sweetly glazed phoenix-tail fish, vegetarian chicken made out of wrinkly tissues of tofu, and jellyfish, her mother's favorite, seasoned with sesame oil and sprinkled with diced green onions. "Tell me," Miriam said, "is that animal, vegetable, or mineral?"

"Here, Ma," Ruth said, holding the jellyfish platter, "you start since you're the oldest girl."

"No-no!" LuLing said automatically. "You help youself."

Ruth ignored this rite of first refusal and placed a heap of noodle-like strands of jellyfish on her mother's plate. LuLing immediately started to eat.

"What's that?" Ruth heard Boomer ask at the other table. He scowled at the jiggling mound of jellyfish as it swung by on the lazy Susan.

" Worms!" Dory teased. "Try some."

"Ewww! Take it away! Take it away!" Boomer screamed. Dory was hysterical with laughter. Art passed along the entire table's worth of jellyfish to Ruth, and Ruth felt her stomach begin to ache.

More dishes arrived, each one stranger than the last, to judge by the expressions on the non-Chinese faces. Tofu with pickled greens. Sea cucumbers, Auntie Gal's favorite. And glutinous rice cakes. Ruth had thought the kids would like those. She had thought wrong.

Halfway through the dinner, Nicky, Sally's six-year-old, spun the go-round, perhaps thinking he could launch it like a Frisbee, and the spout of a teapot knocked over a water glass. LuLing yelped and jumped up. Water dripped from her lap. "Ai-ya! Why you do this? "

Nicky crossed his arms, and tears started to well up in his eyes.

"It's okay, honey," Sally told him. "Say you're sorry, and next time spin it more slowly."

"She was mean to me." He aimed a pout in the direction of LuLing, who was now busy dabbing at her lap with a napkin.

"Sweetie, Grand-Auntie was just surprised, that's all. It's only that you're so strong-like a baseball player."

Ruth hoped her mother would not continue to berate Nicky. She remembered when her mother would enumerate all the times she had spilled food or milk, asking aloud to unseen forces why Ruth could not learn to behave. Ruth looked at Nicky and imagined what she would have been like if she had had children. Perhaps she too would have reacted like her mother, unable to restrain the impulse to scold until the child acted beaten and contrite.

More drinks were ordered. Ruth noticed Art was on his second glass of wine. He also seemed to be having an animated conversation with Miriam. Another round of dishes arrived, just in time to dissipate the tension. Eggplant sautéed with fresh basil leaves, a tender sable fish coated in a mantle of garlic chips, a Chinese version of polenta smothered in a spicy meat sauce, plump black mushrooms, a Lion's Head clay pot of meatballs and rice vermicelli. Even the "foreigners," LuLing reported, enjoyed the food. Above the noise, Auntie Gal leaned toward Ruth and said: "Your mother and I, we ate excellent dishes at Sun Hong Kong last week. But then we almost went to jail!" Auntie Gal liked to throw out zingers and wait for listeners to take the bait.

Ruth obliged. "Jail?"

"Oh, yes! Your mother got into a big fight with the waiter, said she already paid the bill." Auntie Gal shook her head. "The waiter was right, it was not yet paid." She patted Ruth's hand. "Don't worry! Later, when your mother was not looking, I paid. So you see, no jail, and here we are!" GaoLing took a few more bites of food, smacked her lips, then leaned toward Ruth again and whispered, "I gave your mother a big bag of ginseng root. This is good to cure confusion." She nodded, and Ruth nodded in turn. "Sometimes your mother calls me at the train station to say she's here, and I don't even know she's coming! Course, this is fine, I always welcome her. But at six in the morning? I'm not an early birdie!" She chuckled, and Ruth, her mind awhirl, gave out a hollow laugh.

What was wrong with her mother? Could depression cause confusion like this? The next week, when they had the follow-up visit with Dr. Huey, she would discuss it with him. If he ordered her mother to take antidepressants, maybe she would obey. Ruth knew she should visit her mother more often. LuLing often complained of loneliness, and she was obviously trying to fill a void by going to see GaoLing at odd hours.

During the lull before dessert, Ruth stood up and gave a brief speech. "As the years go on, I see how much family means. It reminds us of what's important. That connection to the past. The same jokes about being Young yet getting old. The traditions. The fact that we can't get rid of each other no matter how much we try. We're stuck through the ages, with the bonds cemented by sticky rice and tapioca pudding. Thank you all for being who you are." She left out individual tributes since she had nothing to say about Miriam and her party.

Ruth then passed out wrapped boxes of moon cakes and chocolate rabbits to the children. "Thank you!" they cried. "This is neat!" At last Ruth was somewhat becalmed. It was a good idea to host this dinner after all. In spite of the uneasy moments, reunions were important, a ritual to preserve what was left of the family. She did not want her cousins and her to drift apart, but she feared that once the older generation was gone, that would be the end of the family ties. They had to make the effort.

"More presents," Ruth called out, and handed out packages. She had found a wonderful old photo of LuLing and Auntie Gal as girls, flanking their mother. She had a negative made of the original, then ordered eight-by-tens and had those framed. She wanted this to be a meaningful tribute to her family, a gift that would last forever. And indeed, the recipients gave appreciative sighs.

"This is amazing," Billy said. "Hey, kids, guess who those two cute girls are?"

"Look at us, so young," Auntie Gal sighed wistfully.

"Hey, Auntie Lu," Sally teased. "You look kind of bummed-out in this picture."

LuLing answered: "This because my mother just die."

Ruth thought her mother had misheard Sally. "Bummed out" was not in LuLing's vocabulary. LuLing and GaoLing's mother had died in 1972. Ruth pointed to the photo. "See? Your mother is right there. And that's you."

LuLing shook her head. "That not my real mother."

Ruth's mind turned in loops, trying to translate what her mother meant. Auntie Gal gave Ruth a peculiar look, tightening her chin so as not to say anything. Others had quiet frowns of concern.

"That's Waipo, isn't it?" Ruth said to Auntie Gal, struggling to stay nonchalant. When GaoLing nodded, Ruth said happily to her mother, "Well, if that's your sister's mother, she must be yours as well."

LuLing snorted. "GaoLing not my sister!"

Ruth could hear her pulse pounding in her brain. Billy cleared his throat in an obvious bid to change the subject.

Her mother went on: "She my sister-in-law."

Everyone now guffawed. LuLing had delivered the punch line to a joke! Of course, they were indeed sisters-in-law, married to a pair of brothers. What a relief! Her mother not only made sense, she was clever.

Auntie Gal turned to LuLing and huffed with pretend annoyance. "Hey, why do you treat me so bad, hah?"

LuLing was fishing for something in her wallet. She pulled out a tiny photo, then handed it to Ruth. "There," she said in Chinese. "This one right here, she's my mother." A chill ran over Ruth's scalp. It was a photograph of her mother's nursemaid, Bao Bomu, Precious Auntie.

She wore a high-collared jacket and a strange headdress that looked as if it were made of ivory. Her beauty was ethereal. She had wide tilted eyes, with a direct and immodest stare. Her arched eyebrows suggested a questioning mind, her full lips a sensuality that was indecent for the times. The picture obviously had been taken before the accident that burned her face and twisted it into a constant expression of horror. As Ruth peered more closely at the photo, the woman's expression seemed even more oddly disturbing, as if she could see into the future and knew it was cursed. This was the crazy woman who had cared for her mother since birth, who had smothered LuLing with fears and superstitious notions. LuLing had told her that when she was fourteen, this nursemaid killed herself in a gruesome way that was "too bad to say." Whatever means the nursemaid used, she also made LuLing believe it was her fault. Precious Auntie was the reason her mother was convinced she could never be happy, why she always had to expect the worst, fretting until she found it.

Ruth quietly tried to steer her mother back to coherence. "That was your nursemaid," she coaxed. "I guess you're saying she was like a mother to you."

"No, this really my mother," LuLing insisted. "That one GaoLing mother." She held up the framed photo. In a daze, Ruth heard Sally asking Billy how the skiing was in Argentina the month before. Uncle Edmund was encouraging his grandson to try a black mushroom. Ruth kept asking herself, What's happening? What's happening?

She felt her mother tapping her arm. "I have present for you too. Early birthday, give you now." She reached into her purse and pulled out a plain white box, tied with ribbon.

"What's this?"

"Open, don't ask."

The box was light. Ruth slipped off the ribbon, lifted the lid, and saw a gleam of gray. It was a necklace of irregularly shaped black pearls, each as large as a gumball. Was this a test? Or had her mother really forgotten that Ruth had given her this as a gift years before? LuLing grinned knowingly-Oh yes, daughter cannot believe her luck!

"Best things take now," LuLing went on. "No need wait to I dead." She turned away before Ruth could either refuse or thank her. "Anyway, this not worth much." She was patting the back of her bun, trying to stuff pride back into her head. It was a gesture Ruth had seen many times. "If someone show-off give big," her mother would say, "this not really giving big." A lot of her admonitions had to do with not showing what you really meant about all sorts of things: hope, disappointment, and especially love. The less you showed, the more you meant.

"This necklace been in my family long time," Ruth heard her mother say. Ruth stared at the beads, remembered when she first saw the necklace in a shop on Kauai. "Tahiti-style black pearls," the tag said, a twenty-dollar bit of glassy junk to wear against sweaty skin on a tropically bright day. She had gone to the island with Art, the two of them newly in love. Later, when she returned home, she realized she had forgotten her mother's birthday, had not even thought to telephone while she was sipping mai-tais on a sandy beach. She had boxed the twice-worn trinket, and by giving her mother something that had crossed the ocean, she hoped she would also give the impression she had been thinking of her. Her downfall lay in being honest when she insisted the necklace was "nothing much," because LuLing mistook this modesty to mean the gift was quite expensive and thus the bona fide article, proof of a daughter's love. She wore it everywhere, and Ruth would feel the slap of guilt whenever she overheard her mother boast to her friends, "Look what my daughter Lootie buy me."

"Oh, very pretty!" GaoLing murmured, glancing at what Ruth held in her hand. "Let me see," and before Ruth could think, GaoLing snatched the box. Her lips grew tight. "Mmm," she said, examining the bauble. Had Auntie Gal seen this before? How many times had LuLing worn it to her house, bragging about its worth? And had GaoLing known all along that the necklace was fake, that Ruth, the good daughter, was also a fake?

"Let me see," Sally said.

"Careful," LuLing warned when Sally's son reached for the pearls, "don't touch. Cost too much."

Soon the pearls were making the rounds at the other table as well. Art's mother gave the necklace an especially critical eye, weighing it in her hand. "Just lovely" she said to LuLing, a bit too emphatically. Miriam simply observed, "Those beads are certainly large." Art gave the pearls a once-over and cleared his throat.

"Eh, what wrong?"

Ruth turned and saw her mother scrutinizing her face.

"Nothing," Ruth mumbled. "I'm just a little tired, I guess."

"Nonsense!" her mother said in Chinese. "I can see something is blocked inside and can't come out."

"Watch it! Spy talk!" Dory called from the other table.

"Something is wrong," LuLing persisted. Ruth was amazed that her mother was so perceptive. Maybe there was nothing the matter with her after all.

"It's that wife of Art's," Ruth finally whispered in her American-accented Mandarin. "I wish Art had not let her come."

"Ah! You see, I was right! I knew something was wrong. Mother always knows."

Ruth bit hard on the inside of her cheek.

"Now, now, don't worry anymore," her mother soothed. "Tomorrow you talk to Artie. Make him buy you a gift. He should pay a lot to show that he values you. He should buy you something like this." LuLing touched the necklace, which had been returned to Ruth's hands.

Ruth's eyes smarted with held-back tears.

"You like?" LuLing said proudly, switching back to the public language of English. "This real things, you know."

Ruth held up the necklace. She saw how the dark pearls glistened, this gift that had risen from the bottom of the sea.

FIVE

Ruth held LuLing's arm as they walked to the hospital parking garage. Her slack-skinned limb felt like the bony wing of a baby bird.

LuLing acted alternately cheerful and cranky, unchanged by what had just transpired in the doctor's office. Ruth, however, sensed that her mother was growling hollow, that soon she would be as light as driftwood. Dementia. Ruth puzzled over the diagnosis: How could such a beautiful-sounding word apply to such a destructive disease? It was a name befitting a goddess: Dementia, who caused her sister Demeter to forget to turn winter into spring. Ruth now imagined icy plaques forming on her mother's brain, drawing out moisture. Dr. Huey had said the MRI showed shrinkage in certain parts of the brain that were consistent with Alzheimer's. He also said the disease had probably started "years ago." Ruth had been too stunned to ask any questions at the time, but she now wondered what the doctor meant by "years ago." Twenty? Thirty? Forty? Maybe there was a reason her mother had been so difficult when Ruth was growing up, why she had talked about curses and ghosts and threats to kill herself. Dementia was her mother's redemption, and God would forgive them both for having hurt each other all these years.

"Lootie, what doctor say?" LuLing's question startled Ruth. They were standing in front of the car. "He say I die soon?" she asked humorously.

"No." And tor emphasis, Ruth laughed. "Of course not.''

Her mother studied Ruth's face, then concluded: "I die. doesn't matter. I not afraid. You know this."

"Dr. Huey said your heart is fine," Ruth added. She tried to figure a way to translate the diagnosis into a condition her mother would accept. "But he said you may be having another kind of problem-with a balance of elements in your body. And this can give you troubles… with your memory." She helped LuLing into the front seat and snapped her seat belt in place.

LuLing sniffed. "Hnh! Nothing wrong my memory! I 'member lots things, more than you. Where I live little-girl time, place we call Immortal Heart, look like heart, two river, one stream, both dry-out…" She continued talking as Ruth went to the other side of the car, got in, and started the engine. "What he know? That doctor don't even use telescope listen my heart. Nobody listen my heart! You don't listen. GaoLing don't listen. You know my heart always hurting. I just don't complain. Am I complain?"

"No-"

"See!"

"But the doctor said sometimes you forget things because you're depressed."

"Depress 'cause can not forgot! Look my sad life!"

Ruth pumped the brakes to make sure they would hold, then steered the car down the falling turns of the parking garage. Her mother's voice droned in rhythm with the engine: "Of course depress. When Precious Auntie die, all happiness leave my body…"

Since the diagnosis three months before, LuLing had come to Art and Ruth's for dinner almost every night. Tonight Ruth watched her mother take a bite of salmon. LuLing chewed slowly, then choked. "Too salty," she gasped, as if she had been given deer lick for the main course.

"Waipo," Dory interjected, "Ruth didn't add any salt. I watched. None."

Fia kicked Dory. She made an X with her index fingers, the symbolic cross that keeps movie Draculas at bay. Dory kicked her back.

Now that Ruth could no longer blame her mother's problems on the eccentricities of her personality, she saw the signs of dementia everywhere. They were so obvious. How could she not have noticed before? The time-shares and "free vacations" her mother ordered via junk mail. The accusations that Auntie Gal had stolen money from her. The way LuLing obsessed for days about a bus driver who accused her of not paying the fare. And there were new problems that caused Ruth to worry into the night. Her mother often forgot to lock the front door. She left food to defrost on the counter until it became rancid. She turned on the cold water and left it running for days, waiting for it to become hot. Some changes actually made life easier. For one thing, LuLing no longer said anything when Art poured himself another glass of wine, as he was doing tonight. "Why drink so much?" she used to ask. And Ruth had secretly wondered the same. She once mentioned to him that he might want to cut back before it became a habit. "You should take up juicing again." And he had calmly pointed out that she was acting like her mother. "A couple of glasses of wine at dinner is not a problem. It's a personal choice."

"Dad?" Fia asked. "Can we get a kitten?"

"Yeah," Dory jumped in. " Alice has the cutest Himalayan. That's what we want."

"Maybe," Art replied.

Ruth stared at her plate. Had he forgotten? She had told him she was not ready for another cat. She would feel disloyal to Fu-Fu. And when the time was right tor another pet, an animal she inevitably would wind up feeding and cleaning, she preferred that it be a different species, a little dog.

"I once drive to Himalaya, long ways by myself," LuLing bragged. " Himalaya very high up, close to moon."

Art and the girls exchanged baffled looks. LuLing often issued what they considered non sequiturs, as free-floating as dust motes. But Ruth believed LuLing's delusions were always rooted in a deeper reason. Clearly this instance had to do with word association: Himalayan kitten, Himalayan mountains. But why did LuLing believe she had driven there by car? It was Ruth's job to untangle such puzzles. If she could find the source, she could help LuLing unclog the pathways in her brain and prevent more destructive debris from accumulating. With diligence, she could keep her from driving off a cliff in the Himalayas. And then it occurred to her: "My mother and I saw this really interesting documentary on Tibet last week," Ruth said. "They showed the road that leads to-"

But Dory interrupted her to say to LuLing, "You can't drive to the Himalayas from here."

LuLing frowned. "Why you say this?"

Dory, who like LuLing often acted on impulse, blurted, "You just can't. I mean, you're crazy if you think-"

"Okay I crazy!" LuLing sputtered. "Why you should believe me?" Her anger escalated like water in a teakettle-Ruth saw it, the rolling bubbles, the steam-and then LuLing erupted with the ultimate threat: "Maybe I die soon! Then everybody happy!"

Fia and Dory shrugged and gave each other knowing looks: Oh, this again. LuLing's outbursts were becoming more frequent, more abrupt. Fortunately, they quickly abated, and the girls were not that affected by them. Nor did they become more sensitive to the problem, it seemed to Ruth. She had tried to explain several times to them that they shouldn't contradict anything LuLing said: "Waipo sounds illogical because she is. We can't change that. This is the disease talking, not her." But it was hard for them to remember, just as it was hard for Ruth not to react to her mother's threats to die. No matter how often she had heard them, they never ceased to grab her by the throat. And now the threat seemed very real-her mother was dying, first her brain, then her body.

The girls picked up their plates. "I have homework," Fia said. "Night, Waipo."

"Me, too," Dory said. "Bye, Waipo."

LuLing waved from across the table. Ruth had once asked the girls to give LuLing kisses. But she had stiffened in response to their pecks.

Art stood up. "I have some documents to look over for tomorrow. Better get started. Good night, LuLing."

When LuLing toddled off to the bathroom, Ruth went to the living room to speak to Art. "She's getting worse."

"I noticed." Art was shuffling papers.

"I'm afraid to leave her alone when we go to Hawaii."

"What are you going to do?"

She noted with dismay that he had asked what she would do, had not said "we." Since the Full Moon Festival dinner, she had become more aware of the ways she and Art failed to be a family. She had tried to push this out of her mind, but it crept back, confirming to her that it was not an unnecessary worry. Why did she feel she didn't belong to anyone? Did she unconsciously choose to love people who kept their distance? Was she like her mother, destined to be unhappy?

She couldn't fault Art. He had always been honest about their relationship. From the beginning, he said he didn't want to marry again. "I don't want us to operate by assumptions," he had told her, cradling her in bed soon after they started to live together. "I want us to look at each other every morning and ask, 'Who is this amazing person I'm so lucky to love?'" At the time, she felt adored like a goddess. After the second year, he had spontaneously offered to give her a percentage ownership in the flat. Ruth had been touched by his generosity, his concern for her security. He knew how much she worried over the future. And the fact that they had not yet changed the deed? Well, that was more her fault than his. She was supposed to decide on the percentage interest she should have, then call the lawyer and set up the paperwork. But how could you express love as a percentage? She felt as she had when a college history professor of hers had told the students in the class to grade themselves. Ruth had given herself a B- and everyone else had taken an A.

"You could hire someone to check on your mother a few times a week," Art suggested. "Like a housekeeper."

"That's true."

"And call that service, Meals on Wheels. They might be able to deliver food while we 're gone."

"That's an idea."

"In fact, why don't you start now, so she gets used to the food? Not that she isn't welcome to dinner here whenever she wants… Listen, I really have to get some work done now. Are you going to take her home soon?"

"I guess."

"When you get back, we'll have some rum raisin ice cream." He named her favorite flavor. "It'll make you feel better."

LuLing had objected to the idea of having anyone come to her house to help clean. Ruth had anticipated she would. Her mother hated spending money on anything she believed she could do herself, from hair coloring to roof repairs.

"It's for an immigrant training program," Ruth lied, "so they won't have to go on welfare. And we don't have to pay anything. They're doing it free so they can put work experience on their resume." LuLing readily accepted this reasoning. Ruth felt like a bad child. She would be caught. Or maybe she wouldn't, and that would be worse. Another reminder that the disease had impaired her mother's ability to know and see everything.

A few days after the first housekeeper started, LuLing called to complain: "She think come to America everything so easy. She want take break, then tell me, Lady, I don't do move furniture, I don't do window, I don't do iron. I ask her, You think you don't lift finger become millionaire? No, America not this way!"

LuLing continued to give the immigrant good advice until she quit. Ruth started interviewing new prospects, and until someone was hired, she decided she should go to LuLing's a few times a week to make sure the gas burners weren't on and water wasn't flooding the apartment. "I was in the neighborhood to drop off some work for a client," she explained one day.

"Ah, always for client. Work first, mother second."

Ruth went to the kitchen, carrying a bag of oranges, toilet paper, and other grocery essentials. While there, she checked for disasters and danger. The last time she'd been there, she found that LuLing had tried to fry eggs with the shells still on. Ruth did a quick sweep of the dining room table and picked up more junk mail offers LuLing had filled out. "I'll mail these for you, Mom," she said. She then went into the bathroom to make sure the faucets weren't running. Where were the towels? There was no shampoo, only a thin slice of cracked soap. How long had it been since her mother had bathed? She looked in the hamper. Nothing there. Was her mother wearing the same clothes every day?

The second housekeeper lasted less than a week. On the days she didn't visit, Ruth felt uneasy, distracted. She was not sleeping well and had broken a molar grinding her teeth at night. She was too tired to cook and ordered pizza several times a week, giving up her resolve to set a low-fat example for Dory, and then having to endure LuLing's remarks that the pepperoni was too salty. Recently Ruth had developed spasms across her shoulders that made it hard to sit at her desk and work at her computer. She didn't have enough ringers and toes to keep track of everything. When she found a Filipina who specialized in elder care, she felt a huge burden removed. "I love old people," the woman assured her. "They're not difficult if you take time to get to know them."

But now it was night, and Ruth lay awake listening to the foghorns warning ships to stay clear of the shallows. The day before, when she picked up her mother for dinner, Ruth learned that the Filipina had quit.

"Gone," LuLing said, looking satisfied.

"When?"

"Never work!"

"But she was at your house until what? Two days ago? Three days ago?"

After more questioning, Ruth deduced that the woman had not been coming since the day after she started. Ruth would never be able to find another person before she left for Hawaii. That was only two days from now. A vacation across the ocean was out of the question.

"You go," Ruth told Art in the morning. They had already paid for the rental, and there was a no-refund policy.

"If you don't go, what fun would that be? What would I do?"

"Not work. Not get up. Not return phone calls."

"It won't be the same."

"You'll miss me dreadfully and tell me you were miserable."

Eventually, much to Ruth's chagrin, he agreed with her logic.

The next morning, Art left for Hawaii. The girls were at Miriam's for the week, and though Ruth was accustomed to working alone during the day, she felt empty and anxious. Soon after she settled in at her desk, Gideon called to say that the Internet Spirituality author had fired her- fired, a first in her career. Although she had finished his book earlier than scheduled, he had not liked what she had written. "I'm as pissed as you are," Gideon said. And Ruth knew she should be outraged, maybe even humiliated, but in fact, she was relieved. One less thing to think about. "I'll try to do damage control with the contract and HarperSan Francisco," Gideon went on, "but I may also need for you to document your time spent and outline why his complaints were not in keeping with reality… Hello? Ruth, are you still there?"

"Sorry. I was a little preoccupied…"

"Hon, I've been meaning to talk to you about that. Not to imply that you're somehow at fault for what happened. But I am concerned that you haven't been your usual self. You seem-"

"I know, I know. I'm not going to Hawaii, so I can catch up."

"I think that's a good idea. By the way, I think we're going to hear about that other book project today, but frankly I don't think you'll get it. You should have told them you had an emergency appendectomy or something." Ruth had failed to show up at an interview because her mother had called in a panic, thinking her alarm clock was the smoke detector going off.

At four, Agapi called to discuss final edits for Righting the Wronged Child. An hour later, they were still talking. Agapi was eager to start a new book, which she wanted to call either Past-Perfect Tension or The Embedded Self. Ruth kept staring at the clock. She was supposed to pick up her mother at six for dinner at Fountain Court. "Habit, neuromusculature, and the limbic system, that's the basis…" Agapi was saying. "From babyhood and our first sense of insecurity, we clench, grasp, flail. We embed the response but forget the cause, the past that was imperfect… Ruth, my dear, you seem to be somewhere else. Should you ring me later when you feel more refreshed?"

At five-fifteen, Ruth called her mother to remind her she was coming. No answer. She was probably in the bathroom. Ruth waited five minutes, then called again. Still no answer. Did she have constipation? Had she fallen asleep? Ruth tidied her desk, put the phone on speaker, and hit automatic redial. After fifteen minutes of unanswered ringing, she had run through all the possibilities, until they culminated in the inevitable worst possible thing. Flames leaping from a pot left on the stove. LuLing dousing the flames with oil. Her sleeve catching fire. As Ruth drove to her mother's, she braced herself to see a crackling blaze eating the roof, her mother lying twisted in a blackened heap.

Just as she feared, when Ruth arrived she saw lights flickering in the upper level, shadows dancing. She rushed in. The front door was unlocked. "Mom? Mommy! Where are you?" The television was on, blasting Amor sin Límite at high volume. LuLing had never figured out how to use the remote control, even though Ruth had taped over all but the Power, Channel Up, and Channel Down buttons. She turned off the TV, and the sudden silence frightened her.

She ran to the back rooms, flung open closets, looked out the windows. Her throat tightened. "Mommy, where are you?" she whimpered. "Answer me." She ran down the front steps and knocked on the tenant's door.

She tried to sound casual. "By any chance, have you seen my mother?"

Francine rolled her eyes and nodded knowingly. "She went charging down the sidewalk about two or three hours ago. I noticed because she was wearing slippers and pajamas, and I said to myself, 'Wow, she looks really flipped out.'… Like it's none of my business, but you should take her to the doctor and get her medicated or something. I mean that in the good sense."

Ruth raced back upstairs. With shaky fingers, she called a former client who was a captain in the police department. Minutes later, a Latino officer stood at the doorway. He was bulging with weapons and paraphernalia and his face was serious. Ruth's panic notched up. She stepped outside.

"She has Alzheimer's," Ruth jabbered. "She's seventy-seven but has the mind of a child."

"Description."

"Four-eleven, eighty-five pounds, black hair pulled into a bun, probably wearing pink or lilac pajamas and slippers…" Ruth was picturing LuLing as she said this: the puzzled look on her mother's face, her inert body lying in the street. Ruth's voice started to wobble. "Oh God, she's so tiny and helpless…"

"Does she look anything like that lady there?"

Ruth looked up to see LuLing standing stock still at the end of the walkway. She was wearing a sweater over her pajamas.

"Ai-ya! What happen?" LuLing cried. "Robber?"

Ruth ran toward her. "Where were you?" She appraised her mother for signs of damage.

The officer walked up to the two of them. "Happy ending," he said, then turned toward his patrol car.

"Stay there," Ruth ordered her mother. "I'll be right back." She went to the patrol car and the officer rolled down his window. "I'm sorry for all the trouble," she said. "She's never done this before." And then she considered that maybe she had, but she just didn't know it. Maybe she did this every day, every night. Maybe she roamed the neighborhood in her underwear!

"Hey, no problem," the policeman said. "My mother-in-law did the same thing. Sundowning. The sun went down, she went wandering. We had to put alarm triggers on all the doors. That was one tough year, until we put her in a nursing home. My wife couldn't do it anymore-keeping an eye on her day and night."

Day and night? And Ruth thought she was being diligent by having her mother over for dinner and trying to hire a part-time housekeeper. "Well, thanks anyway," she said.

When she returned to her mother, LuLing complained right away: "Grocery store 'round the corner? I walk 'round and 'round, gone! Turn into bank. You don't believe, go see youself!"

Ruth wound up staying the night at her mother's, sleeping in her old bedroom. The foghorns were louder in this section of the city. She remembered listening to them at night when she was a teenager. She would lie in bed, counting the blasts, matching them to the number of years it would be before she could move out. Five years, then four, then three. Now she was back.

In the morning, Ruth opened the cupboards to look for cereal. She found dirty paper napkins folded and stacked. Hundreds. She opened the fridge. It was packed with plastic bags of black and greenish mush, cartons of half-eaten food, orange peels, cantaloupe rinds, frozen goods long defrosted. In the freezer were a carton of eggs, a pair of shoes, the alarm clock, and what appeared to have been bean sprouts. Ruth felt sick. This had happened in just one week?

She called Art in Kauai. There was no answer. She pictured him lying serenely on the beach, oblivious to all problems in the world. But how could he be on the beach? It was six in the morning there. Where was he? Hula dancing in someone's bed? Another thing to worry about. She could call Wendy, but Wendy would simply commiserate by saying her own mother was doing far crazier things. How about Gideon? He was more concerned about clients and contracts. Ruth decided to call Auntie Gal.

"Worse? How can she be worse?" GaoLing said. "I gave her ginseng, and she said she was taking it every day."

"The doctor said none of those things will help-"

"Doctor!" GaoLing snorted. "I don't believe this diagnosis, Alzheimer's. Your uncle said the same thing, and he's a dentist. Everybody gets old, everybody forgets. When you're old, there's too much to remember. I ask you, Why didn't anyone have this disease twenty, thirty years ago? The problem is, today kids have no time anymore to see parents. Your mommy's lonely, that's all. She has no one to talk to in Chinese. Of course her mind is a little rusted. If you stop speaking, no oil for the squeaky wheel!"

"Well, that's why I need your help. Can she come visit you, maybe for the week? It's just that I have a lot of work this week and can't spend as much time-"

"No need to ask. I'm already offering. I'll come get her in one hour. I need to do some shopping there anyway."

Ruth wanted to weep with relief.

After Auntie Gal left with her mother, Ruth walked a few blocks to the beach, to Land's End. She needed to hear the pummeling waves, their constancy and loudness drowning out her own pounding heart.

SIX

As Ruth walked along the beach, the surf circled her ankles and tugged. Go seaward, it suggested, where it is vast and free.

When Ruth was a teenager, her mother had once run off in the middle of an argument, declaring she was going to drown herself in the ocean. She had waded in to her thighs before her daughter's screams and pleas had brought her back. And now Ruth wondered: If she had not begged her mother to return, would LuLing have let the ocean decide her fate?

Since childhood, Ruth had thought about death every day, sometimes many times a day. She thought everyone must secretly do the same, but no one talked openly about it except her mother. She had pondered in her young mind what death entailed. Did people disappear? Become invisible? Why did dead people become stronger, meaner, sadder? That's what her mother seemed to think. When Ruth was older, she tried to imagine the precise moment when she could no longer breathe or talk or see, when she would have no feelings, not even fear that she was dead. Or perhaps she would have plenty of tear, as well as worry, anger, and regrets, just like the ghosts her mother talked to. Death was not necessarily a portal to the blank bliss of absolute nothingness. It was a deep dive into the unknown. And that contained all sorts of bad possibilities. It was that unknown which made her decide that no matter how terrible and unsolvable her life seemed, she would never willingly kill herself. Although she remembered a time when she had tried.

It happened the year she turned eleven. Ruth and her mother had moved from Oakland to the flatlands of Berkeley, to a dark-shingled bungalow behind a butter-yellow cottage owned by a young couple in their twenties, Lance and Dottie Rogers. The bungalow had been a potting shed and garage that Lance's parents remodeled into an illegal in-law unit during World War Two and rented to a series of brides whose husbands had departed for battle in the Pacific via the Alameda Naval Station.

The ceilings were low, the electricity often shorted out, and the back wall and one side abutted a fence on which alley cats howled at night. There was no ventilation, not even a fan over the two-burner gas stove, so that when LuLing cooked at night, they had to open the windows to let out what she called the "greasy smell." But the rent was cheap, and the place was in a neighborhood with a good intermediate school attended by the smart and competitive sons and daughters of university professors. That was why LuLing had moved there in the first place, she liked to remind Ruth, for her education.

With its small-paned windows and yellow shutters, the bungalow resembled a dollhouse. But Ruth's initial delight soon turned into peevishness. The new home was so small she had no privacy. She and her mother shared a cramped, sunless bedroom that allowed for nothing more than twin beds and a dresser. The combined living room, eating area, and efficiency kitchen afforded no place to hide. Ruth's only refuge was the bathroom, and perhaps for this reason she developed numerous stomach ailments that year. Her mother was usually in the same room as she was, doing her calligraphy, cooking, or knitting, activities that kept her hands busy but left her tongue all too free to interrupt Ruth when she was watching TV. "You hair getting too long. Hair cover your glasses like curtain, can't see. You think this good-looking, I telling you not good-looking! You tune off TV, I cut hair for you… Eh, you hear me. Tune off TV…"

Her mother took Ruth's television-watching as a sign that she had nothing better to do. And sometimes she would see this as a good opportunity for a talk. She would take down the sand tray from the top of the refrigerator and set it on the kitchen table. Ruth's throat would grow tight. Not this again. But she knew that the more she resisted, the more her mother would want to know why.

"Precious Auntie mad-it me?" her mother would say when Ruth had sat for several minutes without writing anything in the sand.

"It's not that."

"You feel something else matter?… Another ghost here?"

"It's not another ghost."

"Oh. Oh, I know… I die soon… I right? You can say, I not afraid."

The only time her mother didn't bother her was when she was doing her homework or studying for a test. Her mother respected her studies. If she interrupted her, all Ruth had to do was say, "Shh! I'm reading." And almost always, her mother fell quiet. Ruth read a lot.

On good-weather days, Ruth would take her book to the dwarf-sized porch of the bungalow, and there she'd sit with tucked legs on a bouncy patio chair with a clam-shaped back. Lance and Dottie would be in the yard, smoking cigarettes, pulling weeds out of the brick walkway or pruning the bougainvillea that covered one wall of their cottage like a bright quilt. Ruth would watch them surreptitiously, peering over the top of her book.

She had a crush on Lance. She thought he was handsome, like a movie star with his neatly cropped hair, square jaw, and lanky, athletic body. And he was so easygoing, so friendly to her, which made her even more shy. She had to pretend to be fascinated by her book or the snails that slimed the elephant plants, until finally he noticed her and said, "Hey there, squirt, you can go blind reading too much." His father owned a couple of liquor stores, and Lance helped with the family business. He often left for work in the late morning and returned at three-thirty or four, then took off again at nine and came back late, long after Ruth had given up listening for the sound of his car.

Ruth wondered how Dottie had been lucky enough to marry Lance. She wasn't even that pretty, though Ruth's new friend at school, Wendy, said that Dottie was cute in a beach-bunny way. How could she say that? Dottie was tall and bony, and about as huggable as a fork. Plus, as her mother had pointed out, Dottie had big teeth. Her mother had demonstrated to Ruth by pulling her own lips back with her fingers so that her gums showed on the top and bottom. "Big teeth, show too much inside out, like monkey." Later Ruth stared in the bathroom mirror and admired her own small teeth.

There was another reason Ruth thought Dottie did not deserve Lance: She was bossy and talked too loud and fast. Sometimes her voice was milky, as if she needed to clear her throat. And when she yelled, it sounded like rusty metal. On warm evenings, when their back windows were open, Ruth listened as Lance's and Dottie's garbled voices drifted across the yard and into the bungalow. On quite a few occasions, when they argued, she could hear clearly what they were saying.

"Damn it, Lance," she heard Dottie yell one night, "I'm going to throw out your dinner if you don't come right now!"

"Hey, gimme a break. I'm on the can!" he answered.

After that, whenever Ruth was in the bathroom, she imagined Lance doing the same, the two of them trying to avoid the people who nagged them without end.

Another night, as Ruth and her mother sat at the kitchen table with the sand tray between them, Dottie's husky voice rang out:

"I know what you did! Don't you play Mr. Innocent with me!" "Don't tell me what the fuck I did, 'cause you don't know!" This was followed by two door slams and the revving of the red Pontiac before it roared off. Ruth's heart was racing along with it. Her mother shook her head and clucked her tongue, then muttered in Chinese, "Those foreigners are crazy."

Ruth felt both thrilled and guilty over what she had heard. Dottie had sounded just like her mother, accusing and unreasonable. And Lance suffered as she did. The only difference was, he could talk back. He said exactly what Ruth wished she could tell her mother: Don't tell me what I think, 'cause you don't know!

In October, her mother asked her to give the rent check to the Rogerses. When Dottie opened the door, Ruth saw that she and Lance were busy unloading a huge box. Inside was a brand-new color television set, brought home in time to watch The Wizard of Oz, Dottie explained, which was going to air at seven o'clock that night. Ruth had never seen a color TV before, except in a store window.

"You know that part in the movie where everything is supposed to go from black-and-white to color?" Dottie said. "Well, on this set, it really does turn to color!"

"Hey, squirt," Lance said, "why'ncha come over and watch with us?"

Ruth blushed. "I don't know…"

"Sure, tell your mom to come over too," said Dottie.

"I don't know. Maybe." Then Ruth rushed home.

Her mother did not think she should go. "They just polite, don't really mean."

"Yes, they do. They asked me twice." Ruth had left out the part about their inviting LuLing as well.

"Last year, report card, you get one Satisfactory, not even Good. Should be everything Excellent. Tonight better study more."

"But that was in PE!" Ruth wailed.

"Anyway, you already see this Ozzie show."

"It's The Wizard of Oz, not Ozzie and Harriet. And this one's a movie, it's famous!"

"Famous! Hnh! Everybody don't watch then no longer famous! Ozzie, Oz, Zorro, same thing."

"Well, Precious Auntie thinks I should watch it."

"What you mean?"

Ruth didn't know why she had said that. The words just popped out of her mouth. "Last night, remember?" She searched for an answer. "She had me write something that looked like a letter Z, and we didn't know what it meant?"

LuLing frowned, trying to recall.

"I think she wanted me to write O-Z. We can ask her now, if you don't believe me." Ruth went to the refrigerator, climbed the step-stool, and brought down the sand tray.

"Precious Auntie," LuLing was already calling in Chinese, "are you there? What are you trying to say?"

Ruth sat with the chopstick poised for action. For a long time nothing happened. But that was because she was nervous she was about to trick her mother. What if there really was a ghost named Precious Auntie? Most of the time she thought the sand-writing was just a boring chore, that it was her duty to guess what her mother wanted to hear, then move quickly to end the session. Yet Ruth had also gone through times when she believed that a ghost was guiding her arm, telling her what to say. Sometimes she wrote things that turned out to be true, like tips for the stock market, which her mother started investing in to stretch the money she had saved over the years. Her mother would ask Precious Auntie to choose between two stocks, say IBM and U.S. Steel, and Ruth chose the shorter one to spell. No matter what she picked, LuLing profusely thanked Precious Auntie. One time, her mother asked where Precious Auntie's body was lying so she could find it and bury it. That question had given Ruth the creeps, and she tried to steer the conversation to a close. The End, she wrote, and this made her mother jump out of her chair and cry, "It's true, then! GaoLing was telling the truth. You're at the End of the World." Ruth had felt a cold breath blow down her neck.

Now she steadied her hand and mind, conjuring the wisdom Precious Auntie might impart like the Wizard. O-Z, she wrote, and then started to write good slowly and in large letters: G-O-O. And before she could finish, LuLing exclaimed, "Goo! Goo means 'bone' in Chinese. What about bone? This concern bone-doctor family?"

And so by luck all fell into place. The Wizard of Oz, Precious Auntie was apparently saying, was also about a bone doctor, and she would be happy for Ruth to see this.

At two minutes to seven, Ruth knocked on Lance and Dottie's door. "Who is it?" Lance yelled.

"It's me. Ruth."

"Who?" And then she heard him mutter, "God damn it."

Ruth was humiliated. Maybe he really had asked her only out of politeness. She bolted down the steps of the front porch. Now she'd have to hide in the backyard for two hours so her mother would not know about her mistake or her lie.

The door swung open. "Hey there, squirt," he said warmly, "come on in. We almost gave up on you. Hey, Dottie! Ruth's here! While you're in the kitchen, get her a soda, will you. Here, Ruth, sit yourself down here on the sofa."

During the movie, Ruth had a hard time paying attention to the television screen. She had to pretend to be comfortable. The three of them were sitting on a turquoise-and-yellow sofa that had the woven texture of twine and tinsel. It scratched the backs of Ruth's bare legs. Besides that, Ruth kept noticing things that shocked her, like how Dottie and Lance put their feet up on the coffee table-without removing their shoes. If her mother saw that, she'd have more to talk about than Dottie's big teeth! What's more, Lance and Dottie were both drinking a golden-colored booze and they weren't even in a cocktail lounge. But what most bothered Ruth was the stupid way Dottie was acting, babyish, stroking her husband's left knee and thigh, while crooning things like, "Lancey-pants, could you turn up the volume a teensy-weensy smidge?"

During a commercial, Dottie untangled herself, stood up, and wobbled about tipsily like the scarecrow in the movie. "How about some pop-pop-pop popcorn, everybody?" And then with arms swinging widely, she took one step backward and loped out of the room, singing, "Ohhhh, we're off to see the kitchen…"

Now Ruth found herself on the sofa alone with Lance. She stared ahead at the television, her heart thumping. She heard Dottie humming, the sound of cabinets being opened and shut.

"So what do you think?" Lance said, nodding toward the television.

"It's really neat," Ruth answered in a small, serious voice, her eyes trained on the screen.

She could smell the oil heating in the kitchen, hear the machine-gun spill of popcorn kernels into the pot. Lance swished the ice cubes in his glass and talked about the programs that he hoped were broadcasting in color: football, Mister Ed, The Beverly Hillbillies. Ruth felt like she was on a date. She turned slightly toward him. Listen with a fascinated expression. Wendy had told her this was what a girl should do to make a boy feel manly and important. But what came after that? Lance was so close to her. All at once, he patted her knee, stood up, and announced, "I guess I better use the can before the show comes back on." What he said was embarrassingly intimate. She was still blushing when he came back a minute later. This time he sat down even closer than before. He could have scooted over to where Dottie had been, so why hadn't he? Was it on purpose? The movie resumed. Was Dottie coming back soon? Ruth hoped not. She imagined telling Wendy how nervous she felt: "I thought I was going to pee in my pants!" That was just an expression, but now that she had thought it. she really did have to pee. This was terrible. How could she ask Lance it she could use the bathroom? She couldn't just get up and wander the house. Should she be casual like him and just say she had to use the can? She gripped her muscles, trying to hold on. Finally, when Dottie came in with the bowl of popcorn, Ruth blurted, "I have to wash my hands first."

"Through the back, past the bedroom," Dottie said.

Ruth tried to act casual, walking speedily while clenching the tops of her thighs together. As she flew past the bedroom, she smelled stale cigarettes, saw an unmade bed, pillows, towels, and Jean Nate bath oil at the foot of the bed. Once in the bathroom, she pulled down her pants and sat, groaning with relief. Here's where Lance had just been, she thought, and she giggled. And then she saw the bathroom was a mess. She was embarrassed for Lance. The grout between the pink tiles on the floor was grungy gray. A bra and panties lay mashed on top of the hamper. And car magazines were sloppily shoved into a built-in wall rack across from the toilet. If her mother could see this!

Ruth stood, and that's when she noticed the dampness on her bottom. The toilet seat had been wet! Her mother had always warned her not to sit on other people's toilets, even those at her friends' homes. Men were supposed to lift the seat, but they never did. "Every man forget," her mother had said, "they don't care. Leave germ there, put on you."

Ruth thought about rubbing off the pee with toilet paper. But then she decided it was a sign, like a pledge of love. It was Lance's pee, his germs, and leaving it on made her feel brave and romantic.

A few days later, Ruth saw a movie in gym class that showed how eggs floated in a female body, traveling along primordial paths, before falling out in a stream of blood. The movie was old and had been spliced in many places. A lady who looked like a nurse talked about the beginning of spring, and in the middle of describing the emergence of beautiful buds she disappeared with a clack, then reappeared in another room describing buds moving inside a branch. While she was explaining about the womb as a nest, her voice turned into a flapping-bird sound and she disappeared into the cloud-white screen. When the lights came on, all the girls squinted in embarrassment, for now they were thinking about eggs moving inside them. The teacher had to call in a slouching, slack-mouthed boy from the audiovisual department; this made Wendy and several other girls squeal that they wanted to curl up and die. After the boy spliced the reel back together, the movie took up again, to show a tadpole called a sperm traveling through a heart-shaped womb while a bus driver voice called out the destinations: "vagina," "cervix," "uterus." The girls shrieked and covered their eyes, until the boy swaggered out of the room, acting proud, as if he had seen them all naked.

The movie continued and Ruth watched the tadpole find the egg, which gobbled it up. A big-eyed frog began to grow. At the end of the movie, a nurse with a starched white cap handed a googly baby to a beautiful woman in a pink satin jacket, as her manly husband declared, "It's a miracle, the miracle of life."

When the lights came on, Wendy raised her hand and asked the teacher how the miracle got started in the first place, and the girls who knew the answer snorted and giggled. Ruth laughed as well. The teacher gave them a scolding look and said, "You have to get married first."

Ruth knew that wasn't entirely true. She had seen a Rock Hudson and Doris Day movie. All it took was the right chemistry, which included love, and sometimes the wrong chemistry, which included booze and falling asleep. Ruth was not quite sure how everything occurred, but she was pretty certain those were the main things that activated a scientific change: it was similar to how Alka-Seltzer turned plain water into bubbly. Plop, plop. Fizz, fizz. That wrong chemistry was why some women had babies born out of wedlock, babies that were illegitimate, one of the b-words.

Before the class ended, the teacher passed out white elastic belts with clips, and boxes containing thick white pads. She explained that the girls were due to have their first periods soon, and they should not be surprised or frightened if they saw a red stain on their panties. The stain was a sign that they had become women, and it was also an assurance that they were "good girls." A lot of the girls tittered. Ruth thought the teacher was saying her period was due in the same way as homework, meaning it was due tomorrow, the day after, or next week.

While she and Ruth walked home from school, Wendy explained what the teacher had left out. Wendy knew things, because she hung out with her brother's pals and their girlfriends, the hard girls who wore makeup and stockings with nail polish dabbed over the runs. Wendy had a big blond bubble hairdo that she teased and sprayed during recess, while chewing gum she saved between classes in a wad of tinfoil. She was the first girl to wear white go-go boots, and before and after school she rolled up her skirt so that it was two inches above her knees. She had been in detention three times, once for coming to school late and twice for saying the other b-words, "bitch" and "boner," to the gym teacher. On the way home, she bragged to Ruth that she had let a boy kiss her during a basement make-out party. "He had just eaten a neopolitan ice cream sandwich and his breath tasted like barf, so I told him to kiss my neck but not to go below. Below the neck and you're a goner." She peeled open her collar and Ruth gasped, seeing what looked like a huge bruise.

"What's that?"

"A hickey, you dummy. Course they didn't show that in that crummy movie. Hickeys, hard-ons, home runs, it. Speaking of it, there was an older girl at this party puking her guts out in the bathroom. A tenth-grader. She thought she was preggers from this boy who's in juvenile hall."

"Does she love him?"

"She called him a creep."

"Then she doesn't have to worry," Ruth said knowingly.

"What are you talking about?"

"It's the chemistry that gets you pregnant. Love is one of the ingredients," Ruth declared as scientifically as possible.

Wendy stopped walking. Her mouth hung open. Then she whispered: "Don't you know anything?" And she explained what Ruth's mother, the lady in the movie, and the teacher had not talked about: that the ingredient came from a boy's penis. And to ensure everything was now perfectly clear to Ruth, Wendy spelled it out: "The boy pees inside the girl."

"That's not true!" Ruth hated Wendy for telling her this, for laughing hysterically. She was relieved when they reached the block where she and Wendy went in opposite directions.

The last two blocks home, the truth of Wendy's words bounced in Ruth's head like pinballs. It made terrible sense, the part about the pee. That was why boys and girls had separate bathrooms. That's why boys were supposed to lift the seat, but they didn't, just to be bad. And that was why her mother always told her never to sit on the toilet seat in someone else's bathroom. What her mother had said about germs was really a warning about sperms. Why couldn't her mother learn to speak English right?

And then panic grabbed her. For now she remembered that three nights before she had sat on pee from the man she loved.

Ruth checked her underwear a dozen times a day. By the fourth day after the movie, her period had not come. Now look what's happened, she cried to herself. She walked around the bungalow, staring blankly. She had ruined herself and there was no changing this. Love, pee, booze, she counted the ingredients on her fingers over and over. She remembered how brave she had felt, falling asleep without wiping off the pee.

"Why you act so crazy?" her mother often asked. Of course, she could not tell her mother she was pregnant. Experience had taught her that her mother worried too much even when she had no reason to worry. If there was something really wrong, her mother would scream and pound her chest like a gorilla. She would do this in front of Lance and Dottie. She would dig out her eyes and yell for the ghosts to come take her away. And then she would really kill herself. This time for sure. She would make Ruth watch, to punish her even more.

Now whenever Ruth saw Lance, she breathed so hard and fast her lungs seized up and she nearly fainted from lack of air. She had a constant stomachache. Sometimes her stomach went into spasm and she stood over the toilet heaving, but nothing came out. When she ate, she imagined the food falling into the baby frog's mouth, and then her stomach felt like a gunky swamp and she had to run to the bathroom and make herself retch, hoping the frog would leap into the toilet and her troubles could be flushed away.

I want to die, she moaned to herself. Die, die, die. First she cried a lot in the bathroom, then sliced her wrist with a dinner knife. It left a row of plowed-up skin, no blood, and it hurt too much to cut any deeper. Later, in the backyard, she found a rusty tack in the dirt, poked her fingertip, and waited for blood poisoning to rise up her arm like liquid in a thermometer. That evening, still alive and miserable, she filled the tub and sat in it. As she sank under and was about to open her mouth wide, she remem bered the water was now dirty with nasty stuff from her feet, her bottom, and the place between her legs. Still determined, she got out of the tub, dried off, and filled the sink, then lowered her face until it touched the water. She opened her mouth. How easy it was, drowning. It didn't hurt at all. It was like drinking water, which, after a while, she realized was what she was doing. So she pushed her face lower into the water and opened her mouth again. She took a deep breath, welcoming death at last. Her whole body backfired in stinging protest. She began coughing in such a loud and hacking way that her mother rushed in without knocking and pounded her back, put her hand on her forehead, and murmured in Chinese that she was sick and should go to bed right away. Having her mother comfort her so lovingly only made Ruth feel worse.

The first person Ruth finally confessed her secret to was Wendy. She knew things, she always knew what to do. Ruth had to wait until she saw her at school, because there was no way she could talk about this on the party-line phone without having her mother or someone else overhear.

"You have to tell Lance," Wendy said, then reached over and squeezed Ruth's hand.

That made Ruth cry even harder. She shook her head. The cruel world and its impossibility swam in front of her. Lance didn't love her. If she told him, he would hate her, Dottie would hate her. They would kick her mother and her out of the bungalow. The school would send Ruth to juvenile hall. And her life would be over.

"Well, if you don't tell Lance, I will," Wendy said.

"Don't," Ruth managed to choke out. "You can't. I won't let you."

"If I don't tell him, how else will he realize that he loves you?"

"He doesn't love me."

"Sure he does. Or he will. Lots of times it happens that way. The guy finds out a baby is coming, and them boom-love, marriage, baby carriage."

Ruth tried to imagine it. "Yep, it's yours," Wendy would say to Lance. She pictured Lance looking like Rock Hudson when he learned Doris Day was going to have his baby. He would look stunned, but slowly he would begin to smile, then grin like a fool and race into the street, unmindful of traffic or people he bumped into, people who shouted back that he was nuts. And he would yell, "I am nuts, nuts about her!" Soon he was by her side, on his knees, telling her he loved her, had always loved her, and now wanted to marry her. As for Dottie, well, she would soon fall in love with the postman or someone. Everything would work out. Ruth sighed. It was possible.

That afternoon, Wendy went home with Ruth. LuLing worked the afternoon shift at a nursery school and would not be home for another two hours. At four, while they were outside, they saw Lance stride to his car, whistling and jingling his keys. Wendy broke away from Ruth, and Ruth ran to the other side of the bungalow, where she could both hide and watch. She could hardly breathe. Wendy was walking toward Lance. "Hello?" she called to him.

"Hey there, girlie," he said. "What's up?"

And then Wendy turned around and fled. Ruth started to cry and when Wendy came back, she consoled Ruth, telling her she had a better plan. "Don't worry," she said. "I'll take care of it. I'll think of something." And she did. "Wait here," she said, smiling, and ran up to the back porch of the cottage. Ruth dashed into the bungalow. Five minutes later, the back door to the cottage flew open and Dottie raced down the porch steps. Through the window, Ruth saw Wendy wave to her before walking away quickly. Then came pounding on the door to the bungalow, and when Ruth answered, Dottie was there, grabbing her by both hands. She stared into her eyes with a stricken face and whispered hoarsely in her milk-and-metal voice, "Are you really-?"

Ruth started bawling, and Dottie put her arm around her shoulders, soothing her, then squeezing her so hard Ruth thought her bones would pop out of their sockets. It hurt but also felt good. "That bastard, that dirty, filthy bastard," Dottie kept saying through gritted teeth. Ruth was shocked to hear the b-word, but even more so to realize that Dottie was angry-not with her, but with Lance!

"Does your mommy know?" Dottie asked.

Ruth shook her head.

"All right. For now, we don't need to tell her, not yet. First, let me think how we 're going to take care of this. Okay? It won't be easy, but I'll figure out what to do, don't worry. Five years ago, the same thing happened to me."

So that was why Lance had married her. But where was the baby?

"I know how you feel," Dottie went on. "I really do."

And Ruth cried even harder, bursting with more feelings than she ever thought a heart could hold. Someone was angry for her. Someone knew what to do.

That night, as her mother cooked with the windows cracked open, loud voices punctured the air above the sound of spitting oil. Ruth pretended to read Jane Eyre. Her ears were straining to hear the words from outside, but the only thing she could make out was Dottie's high-pitched shriek: "You filthy bastard!" Lance's voice was a low rumble, like the revving of his Pontiac.

Ruth went into the kitchen and reached under the sink. "I'm going to take out the garbage." Her mother gave her a raised eyebrow but kept cooking. As Ruth approached the cans by the side of the cottage, she slowed down to listen.

"You think you're so hot! How many others have you screwed?… You're nothing but a thirty-second wonder-yeah, wham, bam, thank you, ma'am!"

"What makes you the goddamn expert, I'd like to know!"

"I do know! I know what a real man is!… Danny… yeah, him, and he was good, Danny is a real man. But you! You gotta stick it up little girls who don't know any better."

Lance's voice rose and broke like a crying boy's: "You goddamn fucking whore!"

When Ruth went back into the house, she was still shaking. She had not expected everything to be so crazy and ugly. Being careless could cause terrible trouble. You could be bad without even meaning to be.

"Those people huli-hudu" her mother muttered. She set the steaming food on the table. "Crazy, argue over nothing." And then she closed the windows.

Hours later, as Ruth lay wide awake in bed, the muffled shouts and screams suddenly stopped. She listened for them to begin again, but all she detected were her mother's snores. She arose in the pitch dark and went into the bathroom. She climbed on the toilet seat and looked out the window across the yard. The cottage lights were burning. What was going on? And then she saw Lance walk out with a duffel bag and hurl it into the trunk of his car. A moment later, he spun the tires on the gravel and took off with a roar. What did that mean? Had he told Dottie he was going to marry Ruth?

The next morning, Saturday, Ruth barely touched the rice porridge her mother had heated up. She waited anxiously for the Pontiac to return, but everything remained quiet. She slumped onto the sofa with her book. Her mother was putting dirty clothes, towels, and sheets into a bag draped over a cart. She counted out the quarters and dimes needed for the laundromat, then said to Ruth, "Let's go. Wash-clothes time."

"I don't feel so good."

"Ai-ya, sick?"

"I think I'm going to throw up."

Her mother fussed over her, taking her temperature, asking her what she had eaten, what her stools looked like. She made Ruth lie down on the sofa and placed a bucket nearby, in case she really did get sick. At last her mother departed for the laundromat; she would be gone for at least three hours. She always pushed the cart to a place twenty minutes away, because the washers there were a nickel cheaper than those at the closer places and the dryers didn't burn the clothes.

Ruth put on a jacket and strayed outside. She slid into the chair on the porch, opened her book, and waited. Ten minutes later, Dottie opened the back door of the cottage, climbed down the four steps, and strode across the yard. Her eyes were puffy like a toad's, and when she smiled at Ruth, the upper half of her face looked tragic.

"How ya doin', kiddo?"

"Okay, I guess."

Dottie sighed, sat down on the porch, and dropped her chin onto her knees. "He's gone," she said. "But he's going to pay, don't you worry."

"I don't want any money," Ruth protested.

Dottie laughed once, then sniffed. "I mean he's going to jail."

Ruth was frightened. "Why?"

"Because of what he did to you, of course."

"But he didn't mean to. He just forgot-"

"Forgot you were only eleven? Jeez!"

"It was my fault too. I should have been more careful."

"Honey, no, no, no! You don't have to protect him. Really. It's not your fault or the baby's… Now listen, you're going to have to talk to the police-"

"No! No! I don't want to!"

"I know you're scared, but what he did was wrong. It's called statutory rape, and he has to be punished for it… Anyway, the police will probably ask you a lot of questions, and you just tell them the truth, what he did, where it happened… Was it in the bedroom?"

"The bathroom."

"Jeez!" Dottie nodded bitterly. "Yeah, he always did like it in there… So he took you to the bathroom-"

"I went by myself."

"All right, and then he followed you, and then what? Did he have his clothes on?"

Ruth was aghast. "He stayed in the living room, watching TV," she said in a tiny voice. "I was in the bathroom by myself."

"Then when did he do it?"

"Before me. He peed first, then I did."

"Wait a second… He what?"

"He peed."

"On you?"

"On the toilet seat. Then I went in and sat on it."

Dottie stood up, her face twisted with horror. "Oh no, oh my God!" She grabbed Ruth by the shoulders and shook her. "That's not how babies are made. Pee on the toilet seat. How could you be so stupid? He has to stick his cock in you. He squirts sperm, not piss. Do you realize what you've done? You accused an innocent man of raping you."

"I didn't-" Ruth whispered.

"Yes, you did, and I believed you." Dottie stomped off, cursing.

"I'm sorry," Ruth cried after her. "I said I'm sorry." She was still not certain what she had done.

Dottie turned around and sneered. "You have no idea what sorry really is." Then she went inside and banged the door shut.

Though she was no longer pregnant, Ruth felt no relief. Everything was still awful, maybe even worse. When her mother returned from the laundromat, Ruth was lying under the covers in bed, pretending to be asleep. She felt stupid and scared. Would she go to jail? And though she knew now that she was not pregnant, she wanted to die more than ever. But how? She pictured herself lying under the wheels of the Pontiac, Lance starting the car and taking off, crushing her without even knowing it. If she died like her father, he would meet her in heaven. Or would he too think she was bad?

"Ah, good girl," her mother murmured. "You sleep, feel better soon."

Later that afternoon, Ruth heard the sounds of the Pontiac pulling into the driveway. She peeked out the window. Lance, grim-faced, carried out some boxes, two suitcases, and a cat from the cottage. Then Dottie came out, dabbing her nose with a tissue. She and Lance never looked at each other. And then they were gone. An hour later, the Pontiac returned, but only Lance got out. What had Dottie told Lance? Why did Dottie have to move out? Would Lance now march up to their door and tell her mother what Ruth had done and demand that they move out that same day as well? Lance hated her, Ruth was sure of that. She had thought being pregnant was the worst thing that could have happened to her. But this was far worse.

She stayed home from school on Monday. LuLing became increasingly fearful that a ghost was trying to take her daughter away. Why else was Ruth still sick? LuLing rambled about bony teeth from a monkey's jaw. Precious Auntie would know, she kept saying. She knew about the curse. This was punishment for something the family had done a long time ago. She put the sand tray on a chair by Ruth's twin bed, waiting. "Both us die," she asked, "or only me?"

"No," Ruth wrote, "all O.K."

"What okay-okay? Then why she sick, no reason?"

On Tuesday, Ruth could not stand her mother's fussing over her any longer. She said she was well enough to go to school. Before opening the door, she looked out the window, then down the driveway. Oh no, the Pontiac was still there. She was trembling so hard she feared her bones might break. After taking a deep breath, she darted out the door, scooted down the side of the driveway farther from the cottage, then edged past the Pontiac. She turned left, even though school was to the right.

"Hey, squirt! I've been waiting for you." Lance was on the porch, smoking a cigarette. "We need to talk." Ruth stood rooted to the side walk, unable to move. "I said we need to talk. Don't you think you owe me that?… Come here." He threw the burning cigarette onto the lawn.

Ruth's legs moved shakily forward. The top half of her was still running away. When she reached the top of the porch, she was numb. She looked up. "I'm sorry," she squeaked. The quiver in her chin shook open her mouth, and sobs burbled out.

"Hey, hey," Lance said. He looked nervously down the street. "Come on, you don't have to do that. I wanted to talk so we could have an understanding. I just don't want this to ever happen again. Okay?"

Ruth sniffed and nodded.

"All right, then. So settle down. Don't get all spooky on me."

Ruth wiped at her teary face with her sweater sleeve. The worst was over. She started to go down the stairs.

"Hey, where you going?"

Ruth froze.

"We still have to talk. Turn around." His voice was not quite so gentle. Ruth saw he had opened the door. She stopped breathing. "Inside," he ordered. She bit her lip and slowly climbed back up, then glided past him. She heard the door close and saw the room go dim.

The living room smelled like booze and cigarettes. The curtains were closed and there were empty TV-dinner trays on the coffee table.

"Sit down." Lance gestured toward the scratchy couch. "Want a soda?" She shook her head. The only light came from the TV, which was tuned to an old movie. Ruth was glad for the noise. And then she saw a commercial, a man selling cars. In his hand was a fake saber. "We've slashed our prices-so come on down to Rudy's Chevrolet and ask to see the slasher!"

Lance sat on the sofa, not as close as he had been that night. He took her books from her arms and she felt unprotected. Tears blurred her eyes, and she tried hard not to make any sounds as she cried.

"She left me, you know."

A sob burst out of Ruth's chest. She tried to say she was sorry, but she could make only mouselike sniffles.

Lance laughed. "Actually, I kicked her out. Yeah, in a way, you did me a favor. If it weren't for you, I wouldn't have found out she was screwing around. Oh sure, I kind of suspected it for a while. But I told myself, Man, you got to have trust. And you know what, she didn't trust me. Can you believe it? Me? Let me tell you something, you can't have a marriage if you don't have trust. You know what I mean?" He looked at her.

Ruth desperately nodded.

"Nah, you won't know for another ten years." He lit another cigarette. "You know, in ten years, you'll look back and say, 'Boy, I sure was dumb about how babies are made!'" He snorted, then cocked his head to get her reaction. "Aren't you going to laugh? I think it's kind of funny myself. Don't you?" He started to pat her arm and she flinched without intending to. "Hey, what's the matter? Uh-oh, don't tell me… You don't trust me. What are you, like her? After what you did and what I certainly did not do, do you think I now deserve this kind of treatment from you?"

Ruth was quiet for a long time, trying to make her lips move right. Finally she said, in a cracked voice, "I trust you."

"Yeah?" He patted her arm again, and this time she didn't jerk stupidly. He continued talking in a weary but reassuring voice. "Listen, I'm not going to yell at you or nothing, okay? So just relax. Okay? Hey, I said 'Okay?'"

"Okay."

"Give me my smile."

She forced her lips to pull upward.

"There it is! Oops. Gone again!" He stubbed out his cigarette. "All right, are we friends again?" He stuck out his hand for her to shake. "Good. It'd be terrible if we couldn't be friends, since we live next to each other."

She smiled at him and this time it came naturally. She tried to breathe through her clogged nose.

"And being neighbors, we gotta help each other, not go around accusing someone innocent of doing wrong…"

Ruth nodded and realized she was still gripping her toes. She relaxed. Soon this would be over. She saw that he had dark circles under his eyes, lines running from his nose to his jaw. Funny. He looked much older than she remembered, no longer as handsome. And then she realized it was because she was no longer in love with him. How strange. She had believed it was love, and it never was. Love was forever.

"So now you know the real way babies are made, don'cha?"

Ruth stopped breathing. She ducked her head.

"Well, do you or don't you?"

She nodded quickly.

"How? Tell me."

She squirmed, her mind turning around and around. She saw terrible pictures. A brown hot dog squirting yellow mustard. She knew the words: penis, sperm, vagina. But how could she say them? Then the nasty picture would be there in front of both of them. "You know," she whimpered.

He looked at her sternly. It was as if he had X-ray eyes. "Yeah," he finally said. "I know." He was silent for a few seconds, and then added in a friendlier voice. "Boy, were you dumb. Babies and toilet seats, Jeez." Ruth kept her head down, but her eyes glanced up at him. He was smiling. "I hope you one day do a better job teaching your kids about the facts of life. Toilet seat! Pee? Pee-you!"

Ruth giggled.

"Ha! I knew you could laugh." He poked his finger under her armpit and tickled her. She squealed politely. He tickled her again, lower along her ribs, and she spasmed as a reflex. Then suddenly, his other hand reached for her other armpit and she groaned with laughter, helpless, too scared to tell him to stop. He twirled his fingers around her back, along her stomach. She balled herself up like a sow bug and fell to the rug below with terrible gasping giggles.

"You think a lot of things are funny, don't you?" He twiddled his fingers up and down her ribs as if they were harp strings. "Yeah, I can see that now. Did you tell all your little girlfriends? Ha! Ha! I almost put that guy in jail."

She tried to cry no, stop, don't, but she was laughing too hard, unable to take a breath on her own, unable to control her arms or legs. Her skirt was tangled, but she couldn't pull it down. Her hands were like that of a marionette, twitching toward wherever he touched as she tried to keep his fingers away from her stomach, her breasts, her bottom. Tears poured out. He was pinching her nipples.

"You're just a little girl," he panted. "You don't even have any titties yet. Why would I want to mess around with you? Shit, I bet you don't even have any tushy hairs-" And when both of his hands shot down to pull off her flowered panties, her voice broke free and blasted out as screeches. Over and over, she made a fierce, sharp sound that came from an unknown place. It was as though another person had burst out of her.

"Whoa! Whoa!" he said, holding up his hands like someone being robbed. "What are you doing? Get a hold of yourself… Would you just calm down, for chrissake!"

She continued the sirenlike wail, scuttling on her bottom away from him, pulling up her panties, pushing down her dress.

"I'm not hurting you. I am not hurting you." He repeated this until she settled into whimpers and wheezes. And then there came just fast breathing in the space between them.

He shook his head in disbelief. "Am I imagining things, or weren't you just laughing a moment ago? One second we 're having fun, the next second you're acting like-well, I don't know, you tell me." He squinted hard at her. "You know, maybe you have a big problem. You start to get this funny idea in your head that people are doing something wrong to you, and before you can see what's true, you accuse them and go crazy and wreck everything. Is that what you're doing?"

Ruth got up. Her legs were shaky. "I'm going to go," she whispered. She could hardly walk to the door.

"You're not going anywhere until you promise you're not going to spread any more of your goddamn lies. You got that straight!" He walked toward her. "You better not say I did something to you when I didn't. 'Cause if you do, I'm going to get really mad and do something that'll make you sorrier than hell, you hear?"

She nodded dumbly.

He blew air out of his nose, disgusted. "Get out of here. Scram."

That night, Ruth tried to tell her mother what had happened. "Ma? I'm scared."

"Why scare?" LuLing was ironing. The room had the smell of fried water.

"That man Lance, he was mean to me-"

Her mother scowled, then said in Chinese: "This is because you're always bothering him. You think he wants to play with you-he doesn't! Why do you always make trouble?…"

Ruth felt sick to her stomach. Her mother saw danger where there wasn't. And now that something was truly really awful, she was blind. If Ruth told her the actual truth, she would probably go crazy. She'd say she didn't want to live anymore. So what difference did it make? She was alone. No one could save her.

An hour later, while LuLing was knitting and watching television, Ruth took down the sand tray by herself. "Precious Auntie wants to tell you something," she told her mother.

"Ah? " LuLing said. She immediately stood up and turned off the TV, and eagerly sat down at the kitchen table. Ruth smoothed the sand with the chopstick. She closed her eyes, then opened them, and began.

You must move, Ruth wrote. Now.

"Move?" her mother cried. "Ai-ya! Where we should move?"

Ruth had not considered this. Far away, she finally decided.

"Where far?"

Ruth imagined a distance as big as an ocean. She pictured the bay, the bridge, the long bus rides she had taken with her mother that made her fall asleep. San Francisco , she wrote at last.

Her mother still looked worried. "What part? Where good?"

Ruth hesitated. She did not know San Francisco that well, except for Chinatown and a few other places, Golden Gate Park, the Fun House at Land's End. And that was how it came to her, an inspiration that moved quickly into her hand: Land's End .

Ruth recalled the first day she had walked by herself along this stretch of beach. It had been nearly empty, and the sand in front of her had been clean, untrampled. She had escaped and reached this place. She had felt the waves, cold and shocking, grab at her ankles, wanting to pull her in. She remembered how she had cried with relief as the waves roared around her.

Now, thirty-five years later, she was that eleven-year-old child again. She had chosen to live. Why? As she now kept walking, she felt comforted by the water, its constancy, its predictability. Each time it withdrew, it carried with it whatever had marked the shore. She recalled that when her younger self stood on this same beach for the first time, she had thought the sand looked like a gigantic writing surface. The slate was clean, inviting, open to possibilities. And at that moment of her life, she had a new determination, a fierce hope. She didn't have to make up the answers anymore. She could ask.

Just as she had so long before, Ruth now stooped and picked up a broken shell. She scratched in the sand: Help. And she watched as the waves carried her plea to another world.

SEVEN

When Ruth returned to LuLing's apartment, she began to throw away what her mother had saved: dirty napkins and plastic bags, restaurant packets of soy sauce and mustard and disposable chopsticks, used straws and expired coupons, wads of cotton from medicine bottles and the empty bottles themselves. She emptied the cupboards of cartons and jars with their labels still attached. There was enough rotten food from the fridge and freezer to fill four large garbage sacks.

Cleaning helped her feel that she was removing the clutter from her mother's mind. She opened more closets. She saw hand towels with holly motifs, a Christmas present that LuLing never used. She put them in a bag destined for Goodwill. There were also scratchy towels and bargain-sale sheets she remembered using as a child. The newer linens were still in the department-store gift boxes they had come in.

But as Ruth reached for the old towels, she found she could not get rid of them any more than her mother could. These were objects suffused with a life and a past. They had a history, a personality, a connection to other memories. This towel in her hands now, for instance, with its fuchsia flowers, she once thought it was beautiful. She used to wrap it around her wet hair and pretend she was a queen wearing a turban. She took it to the beach one day and her mother scolded her for using "best things" in stead of the green towel with frayed ends. By upbringing, Ruth could never be like Gideon, who bought thousands of dollars' worth of Italian linens each year and tossed out last year's collection as readily as last month's Architectural Digest. Perhaps she was not as frugal as her mother, but she was aware of the possibility that she might regret the loss of something.

Ruth went into LuLing's bedroom. On the dresser were bottles of toilet water, about two dozen, still in their cellophane-bound boxes. "Stinky water," her mother called it. Ruth had tried to explain to her that toilet water was not the same as water from a toilet. But LuLing said that how something sounded was what counted, and she believed these gifts from GaoLing and her family were meant to insult her.

"Well, if you don't like it," Ruth once said, "why do you always tell them it's just what you wanted?"

"How I cannot show polite?"

"Then be polite, but throw it away later if it bothers you so much."

"Throw away? How I can throw away? This waste money!"

"Then give it away."

"Who want such thing? Toilet water!-peh!-like I big insult them."

So there they sat, two dozen bottles, two dozen insults, some from GaoLing, some from GaoLing's daughter, who were unmindful that LuLing rose each morning, saw these gifts, and began the day feeling the world was against her. Out of curiosity, Ruth opened a box and twisted the cap of the bottle inside. Stinky! Her mother was right. Then again, what was the shelf life of scented water? It was not as though toilet water aged like wine. Ruth started to put the boxes into the Goodwill bag, then caught herself. Resolute but still feeling wasteful, she put them into the bag destined for the dump. And what about this face powder? She opened a compact case of a gold-tone metal with fleur-de-lys markings. It had to be at least thirty years old. The powder inside was an oxidized orange, the cheek accent of ventriloquists' dummies. Whatever it was looked like it could cause cancer-or Alzheimer's. Everything in the world, no matter how apparently benign, was potentially dangerous, bulging with toxins that could escape and infect you when you least expected it. Her mother had taught her that.

She plucked out the powder puff. Its edges were still nubby, but the center was worn smooth from its once-daily skimming over the curves of LuLing's face. She threw the compact and powder puff in the trash bag. A moment later, she panicked, retrieved the compact and nearly cried. This was part of her mother's life! So what if she was being sentimental? She opened the compact again and saw her pained face in its mirror, then noticed the orange powder again. No, this wasn't being sentimental. It was morbid and disgusting. She stuffed the compact once more into the trash bag.

By nightfall, one corner of the living room was jammed with items Ruth had decided her mother would not miss: a rotary Princess phone, sewing patterns, piles of old utility bills, five frosted iced-tea glasses, a bunch of mismatched coffee mugs bearing slogans, a three-pod lamp missing one pod, the old rusted clam-shaped patio chair, a toaster with a frayed cord and curves like an old Buick fender, a kitchen clock with knife, fork, and spoon as hour, minute, and second hands, a knitting bag with its contents of half-finished purple, turquoise, and green slippers, medicines that had expired, and a spidery thatch of old hangers.

It was late, but Ruth felt even more energized, full of purpose. Glancing about the apartment, she counted on her fingers what repairs were needed to prevent accidents. The wall sockets needed to be brought up to code. The smoke detectors should be replaced. Get the water heater turned down so that her mother could not be scalded. Was the brown stain on the ceiling the result of a leak? She followed where the water might be dripping, and her discerning eye skidded to a stop on the floor near the couch. She rushed over and peeled back the rug, and stared at the floorboard. This was one of her mother's hiding places, where she hoarded valuables that might be needed in time of war or, as LuLing said, "disaster you cannot even imagine, they so bad." Ruth pressed on one end of the board, and lo and behold, like a seesaw, the other end lifted. Aha! The gold serpentine bracelet! She plucked it out and laughed giddily as if she had just picked the right door on a game show. Her mother had dragged her into Royal Jade House on Jackson Street and bought the bracelet for a hundred twenty dollars, telling Ruth it was twenty-four-carat gold and could be weighed on a scale and traded for full value in an emergency.

And what about LuLing's other hiding spots? At the never used fireplace, Ruth lifted a basket containing photo albums. She pried at a loose brick, pulled it out, and-sure enough-it was still there, a twenty-dollar bill wrapped around four singles. Unbelievable! She felt giddy at finding this small treasure, a memento from her adolescent past. When they moved into this place, LuLing had put five twenty-dollar bills under the brick. Ruth would check every now and then, always noting that the bills lay in the same perfectly aligned wad. One day she put a piece of her hair on top of the money; she had seen this trick in a movie about a boy detective. Every time she looked after that, the hair was still there. When Ruth was fifteen, she began to borrow from the stash during times of her own emergencies-when she needed a dollar here and there for forbidden things: mascara, a movie ticket, and later, Marlboro cigarettes. At first she was always anxious until she could replace the bill. And when she did, she felt relieved and elated that she had not been caught. She rationalized that she deserved the money-for mowing the lawn, washing the dishes, being yelled at for no good reason. She replaced the missing twenties with tens, then fives, and eventually, just the singles wrapped with the one remaining twenty.

And now, thirty-one years afterward, in seeing the reminder of her small larceny, she was both the girl she once was and the observer of that younger version of herself. She remembered the unhappy girl who lived in her body, who was full of passion, rage, and sudden impulses. She used to wonder: Should she believe in God or be a nihilist? Be Buddhist or a beatnik? And whichever it should be, what was the lesson in her mother's being miserable all the time? Were there really ghosts? If not, did that mean her mother was really crazy? Was there really such a thing as luck? If not, why did Ruth's cousins live in Saratoga? At times, she became resolute in wanting to be exactly the opposite of her mother. Rather than complain about the world, she wanted to do something constructive. She would join the Peace Corps and go into remote jungles. Another day, she chose to become a veterinarian and help injured animals. Still later, she thought about becoming a teacher to kids who were retarded. She wouldn't point out what was wrong, as her mother did with her, exclaiming that half her brain must be missing. She would treat them as living souls equal to everyone else.

She gave vent to these feelings by writing them down in a diary that Auntie Gal had given her for Christmas. She had just finished reading The Diary of Anne Frank in sophomore English class, and like all the other girls, she was imbued with a sense that she too was different, an innocent on a path to tragedy that would make her posthumously admired. The diary would be proof of her existence, that she mattered, and more important, that someone somewhere would one day understand her, even if it was not in her lifetime. There was a tremendous comfort in believing her miseries weren't for naught. In her diary, she could be as truthful as she wanted to be. The truth, of course, had to be supported by facts. So her first entry included a list of the top ten songs on the radio hit list, as well as a note that a boy named Michael Papp had a boner when he was dancing with Wendy. That was what Wendy had said, and at the time Ruth thought boner referred to a puffed-up ego.

She knew her mother was sneaking looks at what she had written, because one day she asked Ruth, "Why you like this song 'Turn, Turn, Turn'? Just 'cause someone else like?" Another time her mother sniffed and said, "Why smell like cigarette?" Ruth had just written about going to Haight-Ashbury with friends and meeting some hippies in the park who offered them a smoke. Ruth took some glee in her mother's thinking it was cigarettes they were smoking and not hashish. After that interrogation, she hid the diary in the bottom of her closet, between her mattresses, behind her dresser. But her mother always managed to find it, at least that was what Ruth figured, on the basis of what she was next forbidden to do: "No more go beach after school." "No more see this Lisa girl." "Why you so boy-crazy?" If she accused her mother of reading her diary, LuLing would become evasive, never admitting that she had done so, while also saying, "A daughter should have no secrets from a mother." Ruth did not want to censor her writing, so she started recording it in a combination of pig Latin, Spanish, and multisyllabic words that she knew her mother would not understand. "Aquatic amusements of the silica paniculate variety," was her reference to the beach at Land's End.

Didn't Mom ever realize, Ruth now mused, how her demands for no secrets drove me to hide even more from her? Yet maybe her mother did sense that. Maybe it made her hide certain truths from Ruth about herself. Things too bad to say. They could not trust each other. That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.

Ruth now remembered the last place where she had hidden her diary. She had forgotten about it all these years. She went to the kitchen, hoisted herself onto the counter with less ease than she had at sixteen. Patting along the top of the cabinet, she soon found it: the heart-patterned diary, some of the hearts coated with pink nail polish to obliterate the names of various boys she had immortalized as crushes of the moment. She climbed down with the dusty relic, leaned against the counter, and rubbed the red-and-gold cover.

She felt her limbs drain, felt unsure of herself, as if the diary contained an unalterable prediction of what would happen the rest of her life. Once again she was sixteen years old. She undid the clasp and read the words on the inside of the jacket, scrawled in two-inch block letters: STOP!!!

PRIVATE!!! IF YOU ARE READING THIS YOU ARE GUILTY OF TRESPASSING!!! YES! I DO MEAN YOU.!

But her mother had read it, had read and committed to heart what Ruth had written on the second-to-last page, the words that nearly killed them both.

The week before Ruth wrote those fateful words, she and LuLing had been escalating in their torment of each other. They were two people caught in a sandstorm, blasted by pain and each blaming the other as the origin of the wind. The day before the fight culminated, Ruth had been smoking in her bedroom, leaning out the window. The door was closed, and as soon as she heard her mother's footsteps coming toward her room, she dropped the cigarette outside, flopped onto her bed, and pretended to read a book. As usual, LuLing opened the door without knocking. And when Ruth looked up with an innocent expression, LuLing shouted, "You smoking!"

"No I wasn't!"

"Still smoking." LuLing pointed toward the window and marched over. The cigarette had landed on the ledge below the window, announcing its whereabouts with a plume of smoke.

"I'm an American," Ruth shouted. "I have a right to privacy, to pursue my own happiness, not yours!"

"No right! All wrong!"

"Leave me alone!"

"Why I have daughter like you? Why I live? Why I don't die long time 'go?" LuLing was huffing and snorting. Ruth thought she looked like a mad dog. "You want I die?"

Ruth was shaking but shrugged as nonchalantly as she could. "I really don't care."

Her mother panted a few more times, then left the room. Ruth got up and slammed the door shut.

Later, over sobs of righteous indignation, she began to write in her diary, knowing full well her mother would read the words: "I hate her! She's the worst mother a person could have. She doesn't love me. She doesn't listen to me. She doesn't understand anything about me. All she does is pick on me, get mad, and make me feel worse."

She knew that what she was writing was risky. It felt like pure evil. And the descending mantle of guilt made her toss it off with even more bravado. What she wrote next was even worse, such terrible words, which later-too late-she had crossed out. Ruth now looked at them, the blacked-out lines, and she knew what they said, what her mother had read:

"You talk about killing yourself, so why don't you ever do it? I wish you would. Just do it, do it, do it! Go ahead, kill yourself! Precious Auntie wants you to, and so do I!"

At the time, she was shocked that she could write such horrible feelings. She was shocked now to remember them. She had cried while writing the words, full of anger, fear, and a strange freedom of finally admitting so openly that she wanted to hurt her mother as much as her mother hurt her. And then she had hidden the diary in the back of her underwear drawer, an easy enough place to look. She had arranged the book just so, spine facing in, a pair of pink-flowered panties on top. That way Ruth would know for sure that her mother had been snooping in there.

The next day, Ruth had dawdled before coming home from school. She walked along the beach. She stopped at a drugstore and looked at makeup. She called Wendy from a phone booth. By the time she returned home, her mother would have read the words. She expected a huge fight, no dinner, just shouting, more threats, more rants about how Ruth wanted her dead so she could live with Auntie Gal. LuLing would wait for Ruth to admit that she wrote those hateful words.

Then Ruth imagined it another way. Her mother reading the words, pounding her chest with one fist to shove her suffering back into the private area of her heart, biting her lips to keep from crying. Later, when Ruth came home, her mother would pretend not to see her. She would fix dinner, sit down, and chew silently. Ruth would not give in and ask if she could have some dinner too. She would eat cereal from the box at every meal, if that's what it took. They would act like this for days, her mother torturing Ruth with her silence, her absolute rejection. Ruth would stay strong by not feeling any pain, until nothing mattered anymore, unless, of course, it went the way it usually did, and Ruth broke down, cried, and said she was sorry.

And then Ruth had no more time to imagine any other versions of what might happen. She was home. She steeled herself. Thinking about it was just as bad as going through with it. Just get it over with, she told herself. She walked up the stairs to the door, and as soon as she opened it, her mother ran to her and said in a voice choked with worry, "Finally you're home!"

Only she realized in the next moment that this was not her mother but Auntie Gal. "Your mother is hurt," she said, and grabbed Ruth by the arm to steer her back out the door. "Hurry, hurry, we 're going to the hospital now."

"Hurt?" Ruth could not move. Her body felt airless, hollow and heavy at the same time. "What do you mean? How did she get hurt?"

"She fell out the window. Why she was leaning out, I don't know. But she hit the cement. The downstairs lady called the ambulance. Her body is broken, and something is wrong with her head-I don't know what- but it's very bad, the doctors say. I just hope there's no brain damage."

Ruth burst into sobs. She doubled over and began crying hysterically. She had wished for this, caused this to happen. She cried until she had dry heaves and was faint from hyperventilating. By the time they arrived at the hospital, Auntie Gal had to take Ruth to Emergency too. A nurse tried to make her breathe into a paper bag, which Ruth slapped away, and after that someone gave her a shot. She became weightless, all worries lifted from her limbs and mind. A dark, warm blanket was placed over her body, then pulled over her head. In this nothingness, she could hear her mother's voice pronouncing to the doctors that her daughter was quiet at last because they were both dead.

Her mother, as it turned out, had suffered a broken shoulder, a cracked rib, and a concussion. When she was released from the hospital, Auntie Gal stayed a few more days to help cook and set up the house so LuLing could learn to bathe and dress herself easily. Ruth was always standing off to the side. "Can I help?" she periodically asked in a weak voice. And Auntie Gal had her make rice or wash the tub or put fresh sheets on her mother's bed.

Over the following days, Ruth anguished over whether her mother had told Auntie Gal what she had read in Ruth's diary, why she had jumped out the window. She searched Auntie Gal's face for signs that she knew. She analyzed every word she said. But Ruth could not detect any anger or disappointment or false pity in how Auntie Gal spoke. Her mother was just as puzzling. She acted not angry but sad and defeated. There was less of something-but what was that? Love? Worry? There was a dullness in her mother's eyes, as if she did not care what was in front of her. All was equal, all was unimportant. What did that mean? Why didn't she want to fight anymore? LuLing accepted the bowls of rice porridge Ruth brought her. She drank her tea. They spoke, but the words were about meaningless facts, nothing that could lead to disputes or misunderstanding.

"I'm going to school now," Ruth would say.

"You have lunch money?"

"Yeah. You need more tea?"

"No more."

And each day, several times a day, Ruth wanted to tell her mother that she was sorry, that she was an evil girl, that everything was her fault. But to do so would be to acknowledge what her mother obviously wanted to pretend never existed, those words Ruth had written. For weeks, they walked on tiptoe, careful not to step on the broken pieces.

On her sixteenth birthday, Ruth came home from school and found her mother had bought some of her favorite foods: the sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves, both kinds, one with meat filling, one with sweet red-bean paste, as well as a Chinese sponge cake stuffed with strawberries and whipped cream. "Cannot cook you better things," LuLing said. Her right side was still supported in a sling, and she could not lift anything with that arm. It was hard enough for her to haul bags of groceries from the market with her left hand. Ruth saw these offerings as a gesture of forgiveness.

"I like this stuff," Ruth said politely. "It's great."

"No time buy gift," her mother mumbled. "But I find some things, maybe you still like." She pointed to the coffee table. Ruth slowly walked over and picked up a lumpy package that was clumsily wrapped in tissue paper and tape, no ribbon. Inside she found a black book and a tiny purse of red silk, fastened with a miniature frog clasp. And within the purse was a ring Ruth had always coveted, with a thin gold band and two oval pieces of apple-green jade. It had been a gift from Ruth's father, who had received it from his mother to give to his future bride. Her mother never wore it. GaoLing had once hinted that the ring should belong to her, so it could be passed along to her son, who was also the only grandson. Forever after, LuLing brought up the ring in the context of that greedy remark of her sister's.

"Wow, wow, wow." Ruth stared at the ring in her palm.

"This is very good jade, don't loose," her mother warned.

"I won't lose it." Ruth slid the ring onto her middle finger. Too small for that one, but it did fit her ring finger.

Finally Ruth looked at the other gift. It was a pocket-sized book with black leather covers, a red ribbon for a place marker.

"You holding backward," her mother said, and flipped it so the back was the front but facing the wrong way. She turned the pages for Ruth, left to right. Everything was in Chinese. "Chinese Bible," her mother said. She opened it to a page with another place marker, a sepia-toned photograph of a young Chinese woman.

"This my mother." LuLing's voice sounded strangled. "See? I make copy for you." She pulled out a wax-paper sleeve with a duplicate of the photograph.

Ruth nodded, sensing this was important, that her mother was giving her a message about mothers. She tried to pay attention and not look at the ring on her finger. But she could not help imagining what the kids at school would say, how envious they would be.

"When I little-girl time, hold this Bible here." LuLing patted her chest. "Sleep time, think about my mother."

Ruth nodded. "She was pretty then." Ruth had seen other photos of LuLing and GaoLing's mother-Waipo is what Ruth called her. In those, Waipo had a doughy face with wrinkles as deep as cracks and a mouth as severe, straight, and lipless as a sword slash. LuLing slipped the pretty picture into the Bible, then held one hand, palm up. "Now give back."

"What?"

"Ring. Give back."

Ruth didn't understand. Reluctantly she put the ring in LuLing's hand and watched as she returned it to the silk purse.

"Some things too good use right now. Save for later, 'predate more."

Ruth wanted to cry out, "No! You can't do that! It's my birthday present."

But she said nothing, of course. She stood by, her throat tightening, as LuLing went to her vinyl easy chair. She pulled up the bottom cushion. Underneath was a cutting board, and beneath that a flap, which she lifted. Into this shallow cavern, her mother placed the Bible and the ring in its purse. So that's where she also hid things!

"Someday I give you forever."

Someday? Ruth's throat ached. She wanted to cry. "When's forever?" But she knew what her mother meant-forever as in, "When I forever dead, then you don't need listen me anymore." Ruth was a mix of emotions, happy that her mother had given her such nice presents, because this meant she still loved her, yet filled with a new despair that the ring had been taken away so soon.

The next day, Ruth went to the easy chair, pulled back the cushion and cutting board, then reached her hand into the hollow to feel for the silk purse. She extracted the ring and looked at it, now a forbidden object. She felt as if she had swallowed it and it was caught in her throat. Maybe her mother had shown her the ring just to torture her. That was probably it. Her mother knew exactly how to make her miserable! Well, Ruth would not let her have the satisfaction. She would pretend she didn't care. She would force herself never to look at the ring again, to act as though it did not exist.

A few days after that, LuLing came into Ruth's room, accusing her of having gone to the beach. When Ruth lied and said she had not, LuLing showed Ruth the sneakers she had left by the front door. She banged them together and a storm of sand rained down.

"That's from the sidewalk!" Ruth protested.

And so the rights continued, and felt to Ruth both strange and familiar. They argued with increasing vigor and assurance, crossing the temporary boundaries of the last month, defending the old terrain. They flung out more pain, knowing already they had survived the worst.

Later, Ruth debated over throwing away her diary. She retrieved the dreaded book, still in the back of her underwear drawer. She turned the pages, reading here and there, weeping for herself. There was truth in what she had written, she believed, some of it, at least. There was a part of her in these pages that she did not want to forget. But when she arrived at the final entry, she was stricken with a sense that God, her mother, and Precious Auntie knew that she had committed near-murder. She carefully crossed out the last sentences, running her ballpoint pen over and over the words until everything was a blur of black ink. On the next page, the last page, she wrote: "I'm sorry. Sometimes I just wish you would say you're sorry too."

Though she could never show her mother those words, it felt good to write them. She was being truthful and neither good nor bad. She then tried to think of a place where her mother would never find her diary. She climbed onto the kitchen counter and stretched her arm way up and tossed the diary on top of the cabinet, so far out of reach that she too forgot about it over time.

Ruth now reflected that in all the years gone by, she and her mother had never talked about what had happened. She put down the diary. Forever did not mean what it once had. Forever was what changed inevitably over time. She felt a curious sympathy for her younger self, as well as an embarrassed hindsight in how foolish and egocentric she had been. If she had had a child, it would have been a daughter who grew up to make her just as miserable as she had made her mother. That daughter would have been fifteen or sixteen right about now, shouting that she hated Ruth. She wondered whether her mother had ever told her own mother that she hated her.

At that moment, she thought of the photos they had looked at during the Moon Festival dinner. Her mother had been around fifteen in the photo with Auntie Gal and Waipo. And there was another photo, the one of Precious Auntie, whom LuLing had mistakenly identified as her mother. A thought ran through her mind: The photo her mother kept in the Bible. She had also said that was her mother. Who was in that picture?

Ruth went to the vinyl chair, removed the cushion and the cutting board. Everything was still there: the small black Bible, the silk pouch, the apple-green-jade ring. She opened the Bible, and there it was, the wax-paper sleeve with the same photo her mother had shown her at the family reunion dinner. Precious Auntie, wearing the peculiar headdress and high-collared winter clothes. What did this mean? Was her mother demented thirty years before? Or was Precious Auntie really who her mother said she was? And if she was, did that mean her mother was not demented? Ruth stared at the photo again, searching the features of the woman. She couldn't tell.

What else was in the bottom of the chair? Ruth reached in and pulled out a package wrapped in a brown grocery bag and tied with red Christmas ribbon. Inside was a stack of paper, all written on in Chinese. At the top of certain sheets was a large character done in stylish brushed-drawn calligraphy. She had seen this before. But where? When?

And then it came to her. The other pages, the ones buried in her bottom right-hand desk drawer. "Truth," she recalled the top of that first page read. "These are the things I know are true." What did the next sentences say? The names of the dead, the secrets they took with them. What secrets? She sensed her mother's life was at stake and the answer was in her hands, had been there all along.

She looked at the top page of this new stack in her hands, the large calligraphed character. She could hear her mother scolding her, "Should study harder." Yes, she should have. The large character was familiar, a curved bottom, three marks over it-heart! And the first sentence, it was like the beginning of the page she had at home. "These are the things I-" And then it was different. The next word was ying-gai, "should." Her mother used that a lot. The next, that was bu, another word her mother often said. And the one after that… she didn't know. "These are the things I should not-" Ruth guessed what the next word might be: "These are the things I should not tell." "These are the things I should not write." "These are the things I should not speak." She went into her bedroom, to a shelf where her mother kept an English-Chinese dictionary. She looked up the characters for "tell," "write," "speak," but they did not match her mother's writing. She feverishly looked up more words, and ten minutes later, there it was:

"These are the things I should not forget."

Her mother had given her those other pages-what?-five or six years before. Had she written these at the same time? Did she know then that she was losing her memory? When did her mother intend to give her these pages, if ever? When she eventually gave her the ring to keep? When it was clear that Ruth was ready to pay attention? Ruth scanned the next few characters. But nothing except the one for "I" looked familiar, and there were ten thousand words that could follow "I." Now what?

Ruth lay down on the bed, the pages next to her. She looked at the photo of Precious Auntie and put that on her chest. Tomorrow she would call Art in Hawaii and see if he could recommend someone who could translate. That was One. She would retrieve the other pages from home. That was Two. She would call Auntie Gal and see what she knew. That was Three. And she would ask her mother to tell her about her life. For once, she would ask. She would listen. She would sit down and not be in a hurry or have anything else to do. She would even move in with her mother, spend more time getting to know her. Art would not be too happy about that. He might take her moving out as a sign of problems. But someone had to take care of her mother. And she wanted to. She wanted to be here, as her mother told her about her life, taking her through all the detours of the past, explaining the multiple meanings of Chinese words, how to translate her heart. Her hands would always be full, and finally, she and her mother could both stop counting.